How Brie Larson Pushed A Jeep Up A Hill, The Mystery of Maria Rambeau, And Other Things We Learned On The Captain Marvel Set

December 4, 2018

I’m sitting next to Brie Larson, and I’m trying not to scream. Not because Samuel L. Jackson just told me that she pushed a Jeep up a hill as part of her physical training. (More on that later, and yes I just double dipped on my name dropping.) Not because we’re sitting on the set of Captain Marvel, the film that will introduce the world to the character who Nick Fury was sending the Hail Mary text to at the end of Infinity War. No, I’m trying not to scream because I grew up stanning Captain Marvel, ever since I first read Avengers Annual #10. And here I am sitting next to the woman who will portray Carol in her big screen debut next year.

Upon meeting Brie I quickly learned a couple of things. One, she is just as thoughtful and intelligent as she appears on screen and two, she does not suffer fools. I had asked Brie about being the first female led Marvel film and she quickly set the record straight on it:

“You don’t get to decide if you’re an inspiration to people or not. And the idea of … I’ve had, since I’ve agreed to do this role, people have said, “Oh, well you’ll be a role model, blah blah blah.” I’m just gonna do what feels true to me, and if people wanna tag along, they can, and if they don’t, they can bounce, and that’s cool. I’m not gonna go out of my way to do things in order to be something to people.”

Brie Larson is going the mid nineties Charles Barkley route? I’m not mad at it at all. All too often artists put on a facade to impress the public, but in this digital age it’s better to speak your truth. Because people will find out one way or the other.

“All of my heroes were just unapologetically themselves. And they were flawed at times, and that’s okay. So for me, it’s part of who Carol is too. She’s flawed. She’s not perfect. So in order for me … in order for me to feel comfortable stepping into this position, I have to accept my humanness, and remind everybody that I’m a human, and I’m an artist. And I just wanna make art, and that’s really it.”

Besides seeing Carol on screen, something that a lot of fans have been asking about is where is Monica Rambeau? For those of you who are new to the comics, Monica Rambeau is a African-American woman who becomes her own version of Captain Marvel. In fact, she was the first to use the name Captain Marvel, and she has also gone by the name Photon.

While Brie and the watchful Disney publicity team weren’t quite ready to give up the goods on the relationship between Maria Rambeau and Monica, she had nothing but praise for Lashana Lynch and the character of Maria.

“I think the Maria dynamic is really important in this movie. She is the representation of love in this film. And it is something that I’m very proud of, that the love relationship, and it is a deep love relationship, is not by the same lustful definition that we usually attribute to movies of this size. That it’s more complex, and also I think more meaningful than most love relationships that I see in films like this.

And Maria as a character is an incredible badass in her own way. And they are equals, and I think seeing two women that have a playful competitiveness while also mutual respect and care, and have gone through so much together, there’s a lot of history, and are just best friends is something that I’m excited to see. Because uncomplicated sort of female friendships are sort of rare to see. I have a lot of them in my life, so to be able to bring that on screen with someone who’s just so crazy talented, and smart, and beautiful, and wonderful, and is doing her own part to make sure that there are revolutions in a movie that are her own, that she’s creating, is just awesome.”

And about that Jeep and that Hill? Mr. Samuel Jackson told us that Brie started sending him videos of her workouts over a year ago, and that the woman he worked with on films such as Kong and Unicorn Store is not the woman we will see in Captain Marvel. As evidence he showed us one of these videos, and we can confirm that Ms. Larson was, in the immortal cadence of Mr. Jackson himself, pushing a mother***king Jeep up a mother***king hill. She may not choose to be a role model or an inspiration, but when you put in that kind of work, some things just come with the territory.