‘That was my dream’: Brie Larson has brought home $4.3b for the MCU but Disney still gave her childhood dream role to someone else

There’s no stopping Brie Larson. Across her career so far, the 34-year-old actress has won the Academy Award for Best Actress and knocked off highly coveted roles one after the other. She’s currently starring in Apple TV Plus’ Lessons in Chemistry, one of the hottest book adaptations of the year, and she just added the Fast & Furious franchise to her quiver in Fast X. Last but not least, Larson is our Captain Marvel, appearing in three movies to date which have earned a total of $4.3 billion for Marvel Studios.

It must kind of sting, then, that after all she’s done for the company, Disney went and gave the role Larson had dreamed of playing for her entire life to someone else when the opportunity came along. Although, to be fair, the actress may have been a couple of decades too old for the part by the time it became available. Still, given that this role happens to be a part of the Star Wars universe, the door is still open for her to take it on at some point in the future.

Brie Larson dreamed of taking on one of the most iconic roles in Star Wars

While promoting Captain Marvel in 2019, Larson came clean that, as much as playing Carol Danvers meant to her, joining the Marvel franchise wasn’t something she’d necessarily been praying for since childhood. Instead Larson had long been desiring the chance to become part of Star Wars. Specifically, young Brie had her heart set on taking over from Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia Organa.

As Larson revealed to People:

“I wanted to be Princess Leia. Yeah, that was my dream. I actually had a shirt that was way too big for me that I held onto forever because I was convinced they were going to do a movie where they needed, like, a young Princess Leia and I was going to audition for it and that was the shirt I was going to wear. I had it in my closet for probably a decade.”

Of course, as Star Wars fans know, Lucasfilm eventually cast a young Leia in 2022’s Obi-Wan Kenobi in which Vivien Lyra Blair portrayed the future Rebel hero and Resistance general as a child. Obviously, Larson was not exactly in the correct age range to play the character by that time, but that hasn’t stopped rumors circulating about Larson maybe joining Star Wars over the years. In fact, her time as Leia could conceivably still come as Ahsoka heavily foreshadowed some kind of presence for Leia in Dave Filoni’s Mando-verse movie.

Who knows what’s going to happen next in Brie Larson’s career (apart from starring in The Marvels, that is), but she’s already made a bunch of dreams come true, so this one stands as good a chance as any.