Brie Larson is sick of being interviewed by ‘white dudes’

Brie Larson, star of the upcoming Captain Marvel, has always seemed like a good egg. Since securing grade-A status after winning an Oscar for Room, she has worked for survivors of sexual assault and has become an active force in the Times Up movement.

Now she’s making efforts to increase diversity in the press pool.

“About a year ago, I started paying attention to what my press days looked like and the critics reviewing movies, and noticed it appeared to be overwhelmingly white male,” she said.

With this in mind, Larson personally selected Keah Brown – a woman of colour with cerebral palsy – as her interviewer for a Marie Claire feature. Brown noted that: “Nobody usually wants to take a chance on a disabled journalist.”

Larson made a rigorous attempt to confirm that her eyes weren’t deceiving her. There really did seem to be a bias towards the male and the pale.

“I spoke to Dr Stacy Smith at the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, who put together a study to confirm that,” she said. “Moving forward, I decided to make sure my press days were more inclusive.”

It will be interesting to see what effect she can have on the make-up of the busy Captain Marvel junkets. Such operations function on the same scale as the D-Day landings. Several floors of a luxury hotel are given over to videographers, make-up people, caterers, holding rooms and even space for the odd print journalist.