An Oscar-Winning Superhero! Inside Brie Larson’s Casting and the Rise of ‘Captain Marvel’

The Age of Female Superheroes

Mike Madrid, who wrote the book The Supergirls: Feminism, Fantasy and the History of Comic Book Heroines, concurs, adding, “That seems to apply to movies in general that are led by women. There was excitement last year with Ocean’s Eight, which was a success and a shock to the industry when it did so well. At the same time, just because Wonder Woman was a success doesn’t mean that it’s a shoo-in and that we’re going to get all of these movies now with female heroes. I think it’s going to be a case by case basis, where each one of these projects are going to have to prove themselves. I don’t know if that’s ever going to change, but it seems to be the situation we’re in right now.

“There was a misconception in the entertainment industry for so many years that people wouldn’t go see a film like this led by a female character,” he continues. “There were all these skeptics that were expecting Wonder Woman to bomb and they thought people wouldn’t go to see it. But when it was not only a success, but this kind of cultural milestone that women in particular really gravitated towards, it did become a game changer. It showed that there was an audience for these types of characters when they’re done well. And that’s the difference there: they have to be done well and they have to be done in a different way that is still kind of true to the character.”

Kelly Sue Deconnick, whose run as writer on the Captain Marvel comic book has been extremely influential on the movie version, notes, “When they first announced this movie, I knew it would be a huge step forward and would be important in the cultural zeitgeist. The message that it sends to little girls and women of all ages is something that renders me inarticulate, truly. For me, and hopefully, many others who will see the film, she will not just be a female superhero, she will be looked upon simply as a superhero.”

Providing Captain Marvel Some Space in the MCU

Marvel obviously believes they’ve accomplished these goals and more with Captain Marvel, executive producer Jonathan Schwartz reflecting, “Carol Danvers [Captain Marvel’s alter ego] has always been a character fans have had a lot of love for, and she has a really unique and cool voice in the comics. What we wanted to do with Captain Marvel was to give Carol a chance to carve out her own space in the universe and not fit her into the existing continuity or have her show up suddenly on the scene, but really give her a lot of rich, deep connections to the core mythology of the MCU.”

Fans were given a hint regarding the character in the tag scene of Avengers: Infinity War when Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury manages to send a message out to her just before he, like so many others, turns to dust in the aftermath of the villain Thanos using the Infinity Gauntlet. And while Captain Marvel will definitely be front and center in April’s Avengers: Endgame (and is supposedly strong enough to go toe-to-toe against Josh Brolin’s Thanos), her self-titled film allows for the layering in of more background by being set in the 1990s.

Setting Up the Story

Marvel describes the film this way: “Captain Marvel sidesteps the traditional origin story template, with Carol Danvers already possessing her superhero powers. Leaving her earthly life behind, she joins an intergalactic elite Kree military team called Starforce, led by their enigmatic commander, Yon-Rogg. But after Danvers has trained and worked with the Starforce team, and becomes a valued member, she finds herself back on Earth with new questions about her past. While on Earth she quickly leans on Nick Fury, and they must work together against a formidable enemy in the form of the Skrulls — the notorious Marvel bad guys made even more dangerous by their shape-shifting abilities — and their leader, Talos, who is spearheading a Skrull invasion of Earth.”

As far as Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel is concerned, the studio adds, “A former officer and Air Force test pilot, Carol Danvers becomes the universe’s most powerful hero when Earth is caught in the middle of a galactic war between two alien races, the Kree and the Skrulls. Danvers is a maverick and not easily controlled, but through her journey she finds her true self and the path to harness her incredible powers.”

Enter Brie Larson

Over the past decade, it may have been forgotten, but the casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark/Iron Man was shocking, while at the same time adding legitimacy to what Marvel was trying to do. The shock level was pretty similar when Brie Larson, having won the Best Actress Academy Award for Room, decided she would step into Captain Marvel’s uniform for what will ultimately be multiple films.

“This is the most range of a character that I’ve ever gotten to play before,” she enthuses, “and it’s really cool that it’s in something like this. I’ve never had so much time with a character that has so many different varying levels, which I think was one of the aspects I was attracted to, because in the process you learn a lot about yourself. The thing that I found so unique in Carol, from reading the comics and from the script and learning more about her, was her sense of humor mixed with hyper-intelligence and total capability in whatever challenge comes her way. I realized after going to the Air Force base that the Air Force pilots are like that, too. So the spirit of her or the core of her is the Air Force.”

Part of her research, as noted, was immersing herself in the character’s vast comic book history. “I wanted to know everything, so I read everything I possibly could. I had an app on my iPad that’s basically every Marvel comic that’s ever been created. I just spent hours upon hours going through it and reading everything. There are different illustrators in the comic books, who all have their own take on her. There’s a lot of material for me to work with to create something that can feel personal to me and can still feel like it’s mine. It is smartly crafted, and Carol is incredibly dynamic, which leaves a lot of room to play.”

Perfect Casting

Reflects Kevin Feige, “When we found out that Brie Larson might be interested in joining the MCU, we had numerous meetings and pitched her the idea for the film. She was a huge fan of the character in the comic, and one of the highlights of my career at Marvel was introducing her at Comic-Con and having her come out on stage and stand with literally almost every other actor from the MCU. She was at the forefront, which was a great foreshadowing for how audiences are going to embrace Brie as this character.

“The great thing about Captain Marvel,” he elaborates, “is that she is human. There’s a real person in Carol Danvers who gets these incredible powers and has these amazing adventures in outer space. But, as with all the best Marvel characters, she needs to be very human. So, this is not about somebody who is incredibly powerful and can fly around and shoot photon blasts out of her arms. It’s somebody who’s very human, who’s very vulnerable and who has multiple dimensions.”

Jonathan Schwartz notes, “Brie was the only choice for Captain Marvel. In the very early stages, as we were conceiving the character, we very quickly thought of her, because the character was going to be a combination of emotion and vulnerability, strength and power. We saw all those things in Brie from a very early stage. When you go back through her body of work, you see someone who is an incredible actor and capable of conveying a great range of emotion, but is strong in the way you want Carol to be strong.”

Brie Was Drawn to the Material

When meeting the producers, Brie points out, “they showed me some images and started talking about the legacy of this character. They were interested in exploring the complexity of being female, exploring emotion mixed with honor, which I felt were two things that are really important parallels that coincide within Captain Marvel. This desire for perfection combined with the leniency of having an open heart, and how there’s messiness between those two things. Coming out of the meeting, I quickly realized that this could be the biggest platform I could ever imagine from which to tell this story about the human condition, and walking out I just knew we could deliver something great.

“The thing about Carol is that she’s two halves,” the actress elaborates. “She’s Kree and she’s human. And the Kree are really incredible warriors, hyper-intellectuals and the best at what they do. Then there’s this other part of her that’s human, and that is the loving part of her, but it’s also the part that makes her kind of sassy and a little brash at times. It makes he really emotional. It makes her aggressive and competitive. It’s all of the good and all of the bad in that human side. It’s the flaw, and it’s the best thing about her. I think she’s incredibly relatable in that way, because we all have two sides of our brains. We have the left and the right brain. We have the logical and we have the emotional, and we have the war between the two of them. Which one is of most value? And which one should we bring to the table? That internal struggle is what keeps playing Carol so interesting for me, because I’m basically playing two characters at once. And that will keep the movie constantly surprising.”

Captain Marvel: A Quick History

The character of Carol Danvers made her debut in the pages of Marvel Comics in 1968, appearing in a story with Kree Warrior Captain Mar-Vell, who adopted a human identity to spy on the space program at Cape Kennedy/Cape Canaveral. Carol was a security chief at the Cape, and was already designed as a proto-feminist character for that time: a career woman who was an authority figure. She investigated Mar-Vell’s human alias as Dr. Walter Lawson and, perhaps inevitably for that time, she ended up captured by Mar-Vell’s Kree adversary, Yon-Rogg and he had to rescue her.

“In the 1970s,” explains author and comics historian Peter Sanderson, “Marvel tried to launch news series with female protagonists, partly in response to the rise of feminism. So Ms. Marvel, cover dated January 1977, turned Carol Danvers into a superhero. The first issue revealed that when Yon-Rogg had kidnapped her and Mar-Vell rescued her, she had been exposed to radiation from a Kree device called a psyche-magnetron. This allegedly altered her genetic structure, making her half-Kree and endowing her with superpowers, such as super strength. Carol became a superhero known as Ms. Marvel. In her everyday identity, she moved to New York and became editor of a magazine published by J. Jonah Jameson from the Spider-Man comics. Both the name Ms. Marvel and carol’s magazine jobs were nods to the newly created Ms. magazine. Ms. Marvel wore a costume that mimicked Captain Marvel’s but, infamously my today’s standards, it not only had bare legs, but also a bare midriff. In the earliest stories, Carol had a split personality and did not remember her exploits as Ms. Marvel. But her two personalities soon became aware of each other and ultimately were integrated.”

Over the years she went through a lot of changes in the comics, becoming part of The Avengers and then the X-Men and dealing with varied emotional issues. “Although Ms. Marvel was created to be a feminist hero,” Peter points out, “over the year she has often seemed diminished by writers. At first, she had psychological problems (split personality). She was put in costumes designed by men to show off a lot of skin. She was brainwashed and raped. She lost her powers for a while. She became an alcoholic and was court-martialed for irresponsibility. But in the 21^st century, probably because women writers have taken charge of the character, it is hard to imagine any of these storylines being done. Carol’s recent writers seem interested in portraying her as much more of a heroic role model. Marvel’s flagship female hero.”

Adds Hope Nicholson, “Personally, I’m a fan of the more ’90s Captain Marvel where she’s struggling with alcoholism and kind of failing. She has identity issues and that kind of drama. But that’s not something that’s going to be interesting or accessible to a lot of other watchers who wants to see an inspirational role model.”

The Kelly Sue DeConnick Era

As previously noted, the primary influence on the story for the film has come from the comic run of writer Kelly Sue DeConnick. “That run,” says Jonathan Schwartz, “dealt with Carol Danvers in a great way and really made her a fully-realized character for the modern era in which she finally assumed the mantle of Captain Marvel. There was a voice and a tone for that character that felt very cinematic, and we were really excited to dig into and bring to life on the big screen. There were also a few other aspects that we were excited for in that run. One of them being that she gets to be the bridge between the cosmic side of the universe and the earthbound side of the universe.”

It was during that era of the comics, points out Mike Madrid, that Captain Marvel really gained momentum with female readers. “They started calling themselves the Carol Corps,” he says. “They’d show up at conventions dressed as her and stuff like that. That’s when things really took off, because what we got during that Kelly Sue period was this character trying to really find herself and her place in the world. It was very female-centric, but not in a heavy-handed way. The other thing that she avoided was the need to have a love interest. So many of these female heroes always have a love interest and so much of their time is taken up with talking about romance. Traditionally it’s been that way, and I’m pleased she avoided a lot of that. In Kelly Sue’s hands, Carol is just trying to establish herself as the best hero she can be.”

Zorikh Lequidre, author, filmmaker and webmaster behind the site CaptainMarvelCulture.com, proposes, “Through everything, Carol Danvers is vulnerable. She is super strong, she can absorb energy, she can shoot blasts out of her hands, but she’s always trying to overachieve. She’s fighting just a little bit harder, she’s fighting something that’s just a little tougher than her, but she keeps going for it. And that’s how she finds the hero within herself, by doing just a little bit more than she can. That’s the character that Kelly Sue DeConnick brought forth. Even though Carol had a tumor in her head that would get bigger when she used her powers, she still used her powers to save the world. And that is the most inspiring version of the character and of almost any superhero you can find. That willingness to take the hit is inspiring.”

Her Power Could Be Perceived as Threatening

Muses Mike Madrid, “There is this kind of buzz that she is going to be the most powerful hero in that cinematic universe, and that’s a threat to some people because it’s a woman. People are weird that way; I can’t think of another word for it. The other challenge that we have with these female superhero movies, and to some degree the comics faced this as well, is that these women have to be powerful, but they have to be likable as well so that they don’t come off as being threatening. That’s been a problem with the comics for decades, because there’s this whole idea that women don’t have a sense of humor and aren’t funny. For decades you had these characters that were heroic and virtuous and noble, but then kind of boring, too. The fact that we’ve had some new writing styles and some women writing some of these comics, we’ve gotten more range.”

“What will be great,” adds Hope Nicholson with a  smile, “is to see a female character with this immense kind of cosmic power not go insane from it and die gloriously like Phoenix in X-Men did. Even on television, with Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer — when these characters get this immense amount of power and they’re women, it seems they can’t handle it. So having a character like Captain Marvel with that kind of compassion and wisely using her power in certain ways, I think is going to be a really nice departure.”

Closing Thought

Brie remains very much aware of how significant it is to be placed in the forefront of the MCU, particularly in a time when audiences are expecting a lot to change following the events of Avengers: Endgame.

“It’s such an honor to be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” she offers matter of factly, “and to be part of this legacy of characters and storytelling that is so incredibly meaningful to people. These films are part of what’s shaping our culture, who we are, what morals we value. I don’t think that I fully understood the scope of what it means in the cultural zeitgeist until the announcement came out that I was going to be playing Captain Marvel. I’ve slowly started to grasp the vastness and gravity of it all.”

The rest of us will do the same when Captain Marvel is released on March 8.