‘I still don’t feel like I’m a good actress’: A bewildered Brie Larson turned to Jennifer Lawrence for help hours after she won her Oscar

You’d think winning the Academy Award — for Best Actor or Actress, in particular — would leave any Hollywood performer on cloud nine for a long time afterward, but Brie Larson has revealed she fell into a “vulnerable” state of “bewilderment” once she earned the coveted gong back in 2016. Thankfully, fellow actress and Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence was there to see her through it.

Larson has been a prolific performer on our screens since her youth (who’s caught her brief role in 2004’s 13 Going on 30?), but 2015’s Room really showed what she could do as a leading actress. For her portrayal of Joy, a woman held captive for seven years, Larson brought home the iconic golden statuette. But the morning after, she found herself plagued by self-doubt.

Jennifer Lawrence had the perfect advice to cure Brie Larson of her post-Oscar win blues

As Larson revealed to InStyle, ahead of Captain Marvel‘s release in 2019, her muddled mood led her to call up her friend Jennifer Lawrence, who was actually also nominated for the same category the night before. Lawrence had previously won a Best Actress Oscar herself for 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, so clearly there were no hard feelings (pun intended). It turned out that Lawrence knew exactly what Larson was going through and told her everything she was feeling was “totally normal.”

As Larson recalled:

“I was like, ‘I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel better about myself. I still don’t feel like I’m a good actress.’ She was like, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s totally normal. I’ve had the same thing. Don’t think of it like that. Think of it as, like, you got your Ph.D. You’re certified; that’s it. It doesn’t change anything. You can still f*ck up. Every judge is still human.'”

As Lawrence was the second youngest Best Actress winner of all time — she was 22 when she collected the award in 2012 — no doubt she felt a similar bout of intense Imposter Syndrome herself, so it’s heartening that she was there to help her pal through a matching experience. Especially as she lost out on landing a second Oscar thanks to Larson’s incredible performance in Room.

In The Marvels, Brie Larson has other powerful women watching her back, in the form of Iman Vellani’s Ms. Marvel and Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau, but it turns out X-Men’s own Mystique was her first Marvel superhero supporter.