Brie Larson
I didn't have a regular school experience and wanted a more abstract way of learning. I started exploring in lots of different creative ways. It gave me the opportunity to travel and play music, so it was good for me.Collection: Experience
We have to choose every day to be active participants. To wake up in the morning and choose this life and make something of it is an incredible thing. Not many living creatures have that option. We have so many opportunities and options - it's a huge burden, but it's also the most freeing part of our lives.Collection: Morning
I started acting in second grade - my first role was in the Thanksgiving play. I was the Indian chasing the turkey. All the other mom's encouraged my mom to get me into acting after that. Also, when I saw 'The Sound of Music' at Music Circus, I knew I wanted to act.Collection: Thanksgiving
Growing up, I just loved movies. It was how I saw the world, which I wanted to learn more about.Collection: Movies
I love discussing social issues, but I'm not interested in scare tactics. I believe there is a way to bring awareness in tandem with forgiveness and love.Collection: Forgiveness
I have a sister and her name is Mimsy, like from 'Alice in Wonderland,' so we've got some strange names in our family.Collection: Family
For some reason, chewing gum for me gets my brain going.
Women are such strong, powerful leaders, and a lot of the time, we play it silent.
I can't help but trip out about how similar my life is to 'Room.' It's me wanting to stay in my own little bubble and remain anonymous and invisible and at the same time needing to step up to this hand that I've been given.
To find the courage to do what I want to do for myself has been hard.
I wasn't perfect and didn't have it together. I felt alone. So through acting, I decided to be a shape shifter and with every role become the character instead of being myself. It meant about 10 years of no one knowing I was the same person in every movie.
I watch clothes on other people, and it's like having a conversation before opening your mouth. For me, clothes come from the mind. They represent what's happening inside, and as long as they feel honestly like what I'm thinking about and going toward, I'm happy to bounce around and experience different things.
My parents called me the WB frog. Because when I was onstage, I would do this whole song and dance, but if my parents had a family friend over, I would just go hide in the bedroom.
I went through a phase of eating dinner in the shower because I thought, 'Why don't we do that?' Then I realised, 'Because it doesn't make any sense.' It doesn't save any time, and you can't really get into a steak and baked potato when there's water pouring on you.
I love exploring the characters that I play, but the reason I sign on for something isn't the details of the story but the universal message.
I can't tell you how many times I quit only to realize that when the work has been your life, you don't really have a life without it.
If you're in somebody's head for 12 hours a day for four weeks, it's like your brain actually wires itself to start thinking that way.
I have no problem talking about how hard it's been, how broke I've been, and how broke I was not even that long ago.
It can get really messy inside my head, and it's usually just because everybody can get really self-centered at some point. And so what usually keeps me from quitting is that my reasons for quitting are just lame. I wouldn't want anybody else to talk to myself the way that I talk to myself.
The moments that I feel a huge sense of accomplishment are actually the smaller moments, not really the bigger ones, the televised ones.
Because we put ourselves in a movie or on TV, then it must mean we want to be completely open to the world. Sometimes, people will run up to you as if this is Disneyland and I'm a character. I understand their point of view, but it's difficult to explain how terrified it makes me. I'm so nervous.
I hope to direct at some point, but I don't feel the pressure to rush it. I want to really know what it is that I'm doing.
I was nervous to even talk to other kids in my class. I would hide in my room when my parents had people over.
I think it's always the moments that are the trials that end up making you become a hero in the end. You're not a hero unless you've gone through the trials. And it makes these moments so much sweeter, so much better. I don't believe in 'deserved,' but I might believe in 'earned.'
I don't like being able to be reached. I enjoy my solitude. Even people having my phone number seems like too much.
I made three or four different fonts during 'Short Term 12' -' it was how I'd calm my mind between scenes. I have graph paper and gel pens, and I would do the alphabet: just do 'a' over and over again until I got it perfect and then go to 'b' and then 'c'.
The cool thing about designers is they have very specific points of view, and because my inspiration is always changing, it's easy to go, 'This feels right.' But just because I wear fancy dresses on weekends doesn't mean in my heart of hearts I'm not a jeans and T-shirt person.
I won't do things for money. I can't. So I'll hold out and say, in my mind, 'There's a really cool diner down the street from my house. They make really good pancakes; I'd be happy doing that.'
Girls in this industry sabotage one another.
You could put me on a stage in front of 100 people, and I could do a tap dance, but one-on-one was really difficult for me. And it took me most of my life to learn how to work with that anxiety, to embrace and be comfortable with it.
I know what my dharma is: I'm supposed to be an actor.
I'm just getting my sea legs. The first time you make them laugh, you're like, 'Oh my God - that just happened.' Then you're like, 'I made them laugh. I've earned this.'
I had collages in my bedroom when I was a teenager.
Who would I be in 'Game of Thrones?' I love Brienne.
Maybe you're not perfect, but you're willing to actually look at yourself and take some kind of accountability. That's a change. It might not mean that you can turn everything around, but I think there's something incredibly hopeful about that.
Lately, I've been getting too much attention with the Met Gala and work going so well that I try to find rejection in my day. I'll seek out someone on the street or at the farmers' market and ask for something where I know they'll say no. No one likes rejection, but it's real. And I don't want to lose that feeling.
We're coming into a new generation of women where there's the submissive woman, and then our reaction to it is, 'No, I'm a man, too, and I'm masculine,' and then we fight against it, which isn't the answer, either.
My first acting gig was a skit for Jay Leno on 'The Tonight Show.' It was this Barbie commercial where I got to pour mud all over Barbie dolls and watch the heads pop off. It was so exciting, a lot of fun.
When I was seven, I had been very vocal about wanting to be an actor. And my mom decided that we would try it out for a couple weeks and come to L.A. from Sacramento.
I'm not really out in the world all that much. I mean, I live with no phone signal, in the hills surrounded by trees, and I have, like, a mom and two baby deer that come by all the time, and my dogs and the squirrels are in a full-on feud every morning.
I'm just not in a place in my life where I worry about something unnecessarily.
In this industry, where things change so quickly, I've found that having no expectations is the happiest way to go.
We've all recognized the moment when the world has handed us a situation that is bigger than our youth can handle, and we have to grow up in a second. And when you do get to the other side, all it does is take us to this new level of existence that is more beautiful and more complex and, in some ways, more painful.
It's very rare when we are in control of everything. Sure, I can learn my lines, I can know my character really well, but there are so many factors going on throughout the day.
The thing I was always most protective of was my mystery. I worried that if I gave too much of myself, then I would limit the characters I could fall into.
I started watching so many different types of women, saw all the complexities of them, all the ways and the look and shapes they could be, and I felt it was missing for me in American film. I didn't see anybody I was watching in movies that felt like me. I felt rather tortured and lonely about it.
All of the movies that last, that you return to, the movies that struck you as a kid and continue to open up to you 10 years later and 10 years after that - those are the movies I want to make. Those things are eternal.
A big producer offered me the part of the pretty girl that waits at home for the guy, and I couldn't do it. That's not a story I ever want to tell.
I really love learning about animals. I pull from a deck of spirit animal cards. You pull one, and it's about 50 or 60 different animals, and then that day you read whichever animal you pull. And it kind of gives you insight.
The entire process of making a movie is sort of blind trust because, otherwise, all of it just doesn't make any sense: the fact that we can create any sense of reality or emotion given the arbitrariness of a day.