Brie Larson Finally Fulfilled a Goal of Hers While Keeping It a Secret For a Year
Brie Larson has been acting since she was a child, and received an Oscar when she was only in her late 20s. She also took on the role of Captain Marvel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first solo film revolving around a female superhero. It’s been a whirlwind since that movie came out in early 2019 and now she has her own YouTube channel.
In all of this, Larson has also gone on to become very active, starting with training for her role in Captain Marvel. And then she became interested in boulder climbing. Her most recent video detailed how she fulfilled a goal of hers recently in relation to climbing.
Brie Larson climbed the Grand Tetons and showed it on her YouTube channel
On Aug. 6, Larson posted a new YouTube video titled, “I CLIMBED THE GRAND TETON (and kept it a secret!).” In it, she detailed her trek to the Grand Tetons in Wyoming last year, in August of 2019.
She went with her trainer Jason Walsh and Jimmy Chin, a filmmaker and professional mountaineer. Most notably, Chin directed the Academy Award-winning documentary Free Solo.
Larson called it a “once in a lifetime situation” to climb this mountain with Chin. She explained that she trained for 6 weeks, “pretty hard.” And, again, it sort of came off of all the workouts she did preparing for her superhero role. While, as an actor, she could have used stunt doubles 100 percent of the time while shooting, it was important for Larson to embody Captain Marvel as much as she could.
“It didn’t sit well with me to play a strong character without actually being stong,” she explained in the video. When she was actually climbing the Tetons, she said that she “felt raw, and humbled.”
And Chin was impressed with what Larson accomplished, too, when it came to her composure on the mountain.
“I’ve taken a lot of people climbing,” he explained. “[She and Walsh] have that mental strength and discipline to kind of be like, ‘Okay, I need to get focused. I need to be in the moment.’”
Larson has wanted to do this for a while
After nearly six months of training, it’s of course evident that Larson didn’t do this on a whim (that would be highly unsafe). But she’s also talked about it in the past. Even as early as March of 2019, while she promoted Captain Marvel. She was posting Instagram videos of her climbing in a gym, so during her Wired Auto Correct interview, that was one of the search results and she talked about going to the Grand Tetons with Chin.
In her Grand Tetons YouTube video, she explained how she was really on a thin line after her non-stop work schedule over the last few years. She mentally needed this excursion just as much as it was physically demanding.
“My career has been sort of like waves. I’ve been riding some pretty big waves like the past five years,” Larson explained. “I just started to feel burnt out. And I still feel it inside of me, that there aren’t more stories that I can tell, there isn’t more that I can bring until I do this work on myself. And seeing this as an opportunity to do that.”
Larson’s YouTube is fairly new, but she’s loving it
She described the Grand Tetons climb as the “trip of a lifetime.” They were filming it at the time without really knowing what they were going to do with the footage. So once she made her YouTube channel, she felt it was the perfect opportunity to showcase it all.
As for her YouTube as a whole, Larson debuted her channel on July 2 as a place to add to the conversation and give fans more of an insight into her personality and self.
“YouTube has been a place that I have learned so much,” Larson said in her first video. “Whether it’s been how to use my printer or it’s been watching how to be a considerate activist. This is the place to talk about things that are important and that matter.”
While assuring fans that there will be “silly” times, Larson also emphasized that there will be “deep conversations, anti-racist rhetoric, inclusive content.”
And while on First We Feast’s Hot Ones series, Larson shared that it’s a way to “break out of the line of thought” that the public perceives her in.
“I guess deep down, I’ve just been too scared to be so vulnerable on the internet,” she said. “So that’s part of it. Being more open about my flaws, about who I actually am, and not just through a director’s lens or the safety of a character.”
