Brie Larson (‘Lessons in Chemistry’) on Elizabeth’s emotional journey: ‘The thing that really takes her for a ride is love’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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Brie Larson landed not one but two Emmy nominations this year, as the star and an executive producer of the Apple TV+ limited series “Lessons in Chemistry.” Both her categories were revealed during the live broadcast on July 17, but the actor and producer admits that she only tuned into part of the announcement. “I woke up to my phone buzzing,” she tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I wish I could say I had the courage to actually set an alarm and watch it, but it felt too heavy on my heart. And so I was like, ‘I’ll just find out later.’ So once that first [nomination] came through, then I was up, and I watched the rest of it. So it was kind of perfect and surreal because I still felt like I was in the dream time when I was watching it.”
For Larson — who won her first Emmy for producing the virtual reality series “The Messy Truth VR Experience” in 2020 — it was important to sign onto “Lessons in Chemistry” as an EP so that she had enough runway to familiarize herself with all areas of production.
“I think it’s [about] the recognition of all of the different crafts that it takes to make a show, to make anything a moving picture of this kind. It’s [about] all these other crafts that I am not an expert in but I want to collaborate with,” she shares. “So when you get to start — in this case, it was two or three years before we actually filmed it — you’re there on the ground level, having conversations and helping to curate the experience of people and saying, ‘Okay, we’re all gonna work together, and we’re all saying the same thing.’ So [it’s] when you think about not just, ‘I’m playing this character,’ but, ‘What if her apartment didn’t match what I’m doing? Or what can I learn from our production designer about this character, about how she might organize her kitchen? That might help inform the character in ways I [wouldn’t consider].’ So it was sort of just this full immersion, I think, in the entirety of the experience, and it also makes everybody else around you really buy in.”
SEE Brie Larson on the ‘big gift’ she got from producing and starring in ‘Lessons in Chemistry’
On the eight-part series based on Bonnie Garmus‘ 2022 bestseller of the same name, Larson plays Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant, matter-of-fact chemist whose career aspirations are stalled by patriarchal norms but later becomes the star of a cooking show, “Supper at Six,” on which she gets to flex her science know-how. Flashbacks to Elizabeth’s childhood in the sixth episode suggest that her father — a fraudulent preacher who performed “miracles” to gain a following and referred to chemistry as “the real magic” — may have influenced her decision to enter the science field. While it may not be the only reason behind her chosen career path, Larson definitely believes that her character’s upbringing had a lot to do with her eventual pursuit of science.
“I think she comes from this unique background of seeing what her father is doing and seeing what is not correct about that, which I think, in some ways, [is] inevitable — like that sort of pushes her and that’s how life goes,” she argues. “I don’t know if she would have been a scientist without it — maybe she was always destined to — but that was part of what… pushed her in certain directions and want to get into abiogenesis. It’s like, that’s the fun of life! You know, I’m sitting here talking to you as an actor. I wanted to be an actor when I was seven years old. How much of that is based upon the film and television I watched as a kid, and my ability to dream because I was introverted? It’s like, life has this way of having this minutiae that we just can’t fully unpack.”
SEE Interview with ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ star Lewis Pullman
That is certainly true for Elizabeth. Having spent the majority of her life chasing scientific truths, the Elizabeth viewers meet at the beginning of the series doesn’t exactly know what it’s like to be emotionally invested in another person. So when she meets and falls in love with fellow chemist Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), she is forced to navigate uncharted waters.
“The bigger arc, I think, for Elizabeth in this show is her love of science and wanting to know why we’re here and what our purpose is — and she so badly wants to quantify it. But the thing that really takes her for a ride is love,” Larson says about her character’s emotional journey across the show’s eight installments. “And there’s no scientific experiment for love; it’s just something that exists and is there, and it takes you where it will. And so I think it’s her sort of letting go of that grip and understanding that as much as she has this thirst for knowledge, there’s this big thing that she will never really know but she sort of succumbs to, and [she] allows this life to romance her in the end.”
With the feelings Elizabeth develops for Calvin also comes the tremendous grief she experiences after his unexpected death at the end of the second episode. “There’s the death, but there’s also so much misfortune that goes along with it: an unexpected pregnancy, losing her work and just this loss. And she’s completely unmoored from the rest of her reality, and so I think there’s, like, such a sense of overwhelm that it almost just kind of creates this solid lock in her that she can’t actually open up to and look at, because it would just take her to the floor,” Larson explains. “And I realized that, for her, when she’s not expressing those emotions and they’re not coming out, it’s like she has to fight. Like, she has this thing where she will not! Even in a quiet moment with herself, she will not! But you realize that, like, the fight isn’t always in the fight; sometimes, the fight is in the letting go, and that’s what she’s discovering.”
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