Brie Larson may have accomplished more by the time she turned 30 than a lot of other aspiring talents manage to achieve in their entire careers, but it wasn’t as if the success simply fell into her lap. The hardest part of making it in Hollywood is getting your foot in the door in the first place, and once Larson finally caught her big break there was no looking back.
As well as winning an Academy Award for Best Actress at the age of just 26 following a string of acclaimed supporting roles, the Short Term 12 star also made her feature-length directorial debut with Netflix’s Unicorn Store and of course, joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Captain Marvel, headlining a billion-dollar box office hit and establishing herself as one of the key components of the franchise’s future.
However, it hasn’t always been plain sailing, and Larson recently named the long list of projects that she had unsuccessfully auditioned for in the past including The Hunger Games, the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy and Terminator Genisys. Even though she lost out on the role of Sarah Connor in the fifth installment of the sci-fi franchise to Emilia Clarke, the movie bombed anyway and saw plans for yet another Terminator trilogy abandoned at the first hurdle, with Larson recently revealing the strange reason she failed her audition.
“I did my audition. A couple days later, I found out that I didn’t get it, and I got no feedback whatsoever. I felt like I did a really good job. I didn’t understand, and then months later, my manager called, and was like, ‘Listen. We got the feedback, finally, and what it was, was they said that they didn’t think that you know how to carry a gun’. I mean, I’m grateful, because I don’t want to hold a gun in a movie. I just thought it was funny that in their head, they thought I couldn’t hold a gun, so I didn’t get the job.”
Emilia Clarke hasn’t exactly been very complimentary about her experience on Terminator Genisys, so Brie Larson should consider herself lucky that she apparently didn’t know how to hold a gun despite not actually holding one. Besides, since then, the actress’ career has gone from strength to strength, while the Terminator franchise looks dead and buried, so it all seems to have worked out for her in the end.