Best Actress Oscar winner Brie Larson said after her win for “Room” Sunday that when she started acting, she had to deal with auditions where she was asked to dress “sexy.”
“There were many times where I would go into auditions and they’d say it’s really great, but we’d love for you to come back in a jean mini and high heels. And those were a fork in the road because there was no reason for me to come in a jean mini skirt and high heels,” she said. “They asked me to wear that to be sexy, but it doesn’t make me feel sexy.”
Larson spoke in the Oscars ceremony’s backstage press room about standing up for herself and what her win means. In “Room,” she plays a young woman abducted and kept in a shed for years. She gives birth to a son after years of being raped.
“This time a year ago, I was still trying to figure out who I was. I was in deep searching, I was pulling apart the pieces I learned from being Ma,” her character in the film, she said. “By the point the movie was done, I was so far away from who I was when I started.”
She spoke about what her Best Actress win meant for abused women like her character.
“I don’t think an Oscar win changes anything for those women,” she said. “I do hope that in the core of it, when feeling trapped whether metaphorically of physically, we want to talk about abuse — there are many ways we can be abused or confined — I hope this story helps change people and make them feel free. This was to make me break free from my personal boundaries.”
And she talked about what she taught her movie son, Jacob Tremblay: “I learned more from him than he ever did from me.”