Throughout this interview with Entertainment Weekly, Brie Larson really emphasizes the flaws of Carol Danvers as a person.
Carol Danvers — the Air Force pilot with alien powers that Larson plays in Captain Marvel — is very flawed. She may be a part-Kree, part-human warrior with the powers of a god, but she’s anything but godlike: She’s aggressive and brash, impulsive and hotheaded. She’s the first one to rush into battle, and she doesn’t always wait for orders. She tells bad jokes. And in many ways, Captain Marvel (out March 2019) finds her at war with herself, as she tries to reconcile her Kree perfectionism with her human fallibility.
It really seems like Marvel Studios are trying their damndest to avoid her being called a Mary Sue like Rey was wrongly labeled in Star Wars: The Force Awakens by certain fans. So, it seems like they’re really going to emphasize her core character flaws from the comics, which actually is her being too aggressive and quick to anger, which sometimes has disastrous results for herself and her friends.
“You have this Kree part of her that’s unemotional, that is an amazing fighter and competitive,” Larson says. “Then there’s this human part of her that is flawed but is also the thing that she ends up leading by. It’s the thing that gets her in trouble, but it’s also the thing that makes her great. And those two sides warring against each other is what makes her her.”
It’s likely that she’ll be the black sheep among the Kree due to these qualities, especially since Mar-Vell sees her as a “pet project” and that her “human part” is what gets her in trouble. What’s more interesting is that they specify that Carol Danvers might actually not know everything about her past and true identity.
When the film starts, Carol has left Earth behind to adventure in the stars and join the elite Kree military team Starforce, but she soon finds herself back on her home planet with new questions about her past and identity.
Which brings up the thought that maybe, like in the comics, she’s lost her memories and will find out the truth. Brie Larson herself expands that this will connect to more emotionally driven scenes in the movie, comparing them to her other works in drama.
“That is something that is really exciting to me about this film: We did not cut corners on that stuff,” Larson says. “Like, when it’s funny, it is funny, but also when there’s deep emotional things happening, it’s real. So I was able to bring some of those same things that I’ve brought to full dramatic roles into this, which I’m really proud of because I think it will really set this film apart.”
This is some tremendous news for me since I loved Brie Larson’s Academy Award winning performance in Room as a mother trying to raise her son and protecting him from the harsh reality of their situation. In that movie her character goes to some especially dark places as she confronts, what she feels like, are mistakes that she had made as a mother. It’d be great to see Brie Larson explore even half those depths for Captain Marvel and the character of Carol Danvers.
Source: EW
