The future Oscar winner hadn’t even been in what’s widely considered to be her breakout film when she played Scott’s evil ex, Envy Adams.
Larson had done a bunch of TV, including Popular and Raising Dad, had a small role in Noah Baumbach Greenberg and had landed the role of Toni Collette‘s daughter on Showtime’s The United States of Tara, but otherwise the Sacramento, Calif., native was fairly unknown.
Then came the critically acclaimed indie drama Short Term 12, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and which she credits with opening a series of doors for her (most of which she declined to walk through, finding the roles to be pretty generic). She did accept the part of Amy Schumer‘s settled-down sister in Trainwreck, which was a big hit. But then she was cast in Room, playing a kidnapping survivor who’s trying to make life right for her son in the adaptation of Emma Donoghue‘s novel, and she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2016.
And now she’s Captain Marvel. Her stand-alone film, introducing Larson as Carol Danvers and her superhero alter ego, earned over a billion dollars worldwide, and a few months later Avengers: Endgame became the highest-grossing film of all time, earning $2.8 billion.
Because it’s a small world and it all revolves around Scott Pilgrim, Larson dated Phantom Planet singer Alex Greenwald for about six years, and they got engaged in 2017, before splitting up last year.