To catch up with Brie Larson, one of Hollywood’s busiest and most indefatigable actresses, I take a trip to a utilitarian postproduction studio in the San Fernando Valley, where she is editing Unicorn Store, her feature-film directorial debut. The temporary office is affectionately decorated like a dorm room—cluttered with photos, drawings of unicorns, a Super Mario backpack, and personalized stationery. (She’s a diligent writer of thank-you notes.) Dressed in ripped black jeans, a bulky sweater, and black boots, her blond hair pulled back in a topknot, Larson looks like a typical young Angeleno.

She takes a break to show me some footage of the film, a coming-of-age comedy that stars Larson and a constellation of veteran actors, including Joan Cusack, Bradley Whitford, and Samuel L. Jackson. It is an ambitious project that might intimidate any young director, especially considering that only 7 percent of top Hollywood movies last year were directed by women, according to research by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. But Larson, 27 years old, shrugs off any notion of first-time jitters. “I felt like, What better time for me to direct than now, when I don’t have a stigma attached of this extra scrutiny, like, ‘Oh, she’s an actor—now she wants to be a director’?”

If Larson seems nonchalant about helming her first movie, it’s probably because her career has been two decades in the making. She gained critical success with 2013’s small indie Short Term 12, and her performance in 2015’s Room catapulted her to a best-actress Oscar and stardom.

But Larson has been slogging through the circuit of auditions, commercials, and sitcoms since the age of seven. “By the time I was 18, my friends were going to college, and I was still auditioning. It became this real turning point,” she admits. “Am I supposed to do this? Is it worth how this makes me feel sometimes? I realized then that story was too important to me.” The next year she landed a role as Toni Collette’s troubled teenage daughter on The United States of Tara, a Showtime series that included Steven Spielberg as an executive producer and ran from 2009 to 2011. Soon after came steady work playing other daughters (in Rampart, opposite Woody Harrelson), sisters (Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s in Don Jon and Amy Schumer’s in Trainwreck), and love interests (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 21 Jump Street, and The Spectacular Now).

Since her Oscar, Larson has been on a tear, appearing in the big-budget action movie Kong: Skull Island, which has earned $500 million worldwide and counting. In April she switched gears, in British cult filmmaker Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, a cheeky retro 1970s criminal shoot-’em-up whose executive producer is Martin Scorsese. This fall she portrays author Jeannette Walls in the adaptation of Walls’s best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle, co-starring Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson—a film that’s already earning Oscar buzz. Recently it was announced that she would star as Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States, in an Amazon Studios film.

Then there’s the crown jewel: Disney’s Marvel Studios announced at the last Comic-Con that Larson would play Captain Marvel, a female superhero whose powers, according to the official studio Web site, include “flight, enhanced strength, durability and the ability to shoot concussive energy bursts from her hands.” Captain Marvel is the first woman in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (The Avengers, Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men) to get a stand-alone film—the role of a lifetime for any young actress.

Born Brianne Sidonie Desaulniers to Heather and Sylvain, holistic-medicine practitioners, Brie told her parents that her “chakra” was acting. “I would wear VHS tapes out,” she recalls. “One of them was Gone with the Wind. I would walk around the house going, ‘Ashley, Ashley.’ ” Yet if her parents asked her to do a Scarlett O’Hara impression for family friends, Larson says, she would run upstairs and hide. “I was very shy in school,” she remembers. “I didn’t talk to anybody.”

In the mid-1990s, she, her younger sister (now a high-school math teacher), and their mom relocated from Sacramento to Los Angeles so Larson could pursue her theatrical ambitions. After a difficult divorce, Heather was struggling to get by as a single parent. Brie has talked openly in the past about the challenges of her childhood, which included sharing a Murphy bed in their studio apartment and not being able to even afford a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

Larson was mostly home-schooled, and even after work began to pick up—her first break came in 1998, when she was cast in some parody commercials for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno—money was tight. She bought secondhand school uniforms from local thrift stores. “It was easy because they were all the same color, and you spend less time making a decision, so you can spend that time on other aspects of your life.” Only a few years ago, Larson admits, she was “living off the food in the film-festival welcome gift bags.”

Though Larson can work a red carpet like the best of them, she concedes that, for her, fashion is a work in progress. “I’m trying to understand what my sense of style is now,” she says. “I still refuse to pay a lot for clothes.” Larson also has an evolving relationship with money—coming from none, it’s baby steps. She bought her first car last year, donates as much as she can to charities, and recently paid $2,000 to fix her hot tub —“I felt really guilty because a hot tub’s a luxury item to me.” Larson’s hardscrabble upbringing has imbued her with a humility that has earned her the admiration of some of the industry’s biggest talents. “Brie’s a bright, unaffected young woman who is in a wonderfully corrosive business that would ruin most people,” says Samuel L. Jackson, a Kong: Skull Island co-star. “But it’s not going to ruin her.” During filming, Jackson learned that Larson was pursuing Bill Murray for a role in Unicorn Store. “ So, do you really think Bill Murray is a better actor than I am?” he asked Larson, laughing as he tells me the story. “I pretty much asked her for the part.” He says Larson didn’t disappoint as a director. “She was well prepared . . . cooperative. She knew why she hired me. She allowed me to bring a lot of different things to the part and have as much fun as I wanted to have.”

Larson’s prowess as an artist comes as no surprise to colleagues who have watched her evolve professionally. Destin Cretton directed Larson to an Independent Spirit Award best-actress nomination in Short Term 12and re-united with her for The Glass Castle. I asked him how Larson had changed in the five years since they had worked together. “She was always like an electric bomb that was fearlessly exploding . . . . That is still a huge part of her magic, but she’s learned to control her craft so much more,” he says.

“Of course, everybody changes, but she is not up in the clouds . . . . It’s why she comes across so great on-screen, because when she’s listening to other actors, it’s a reflection of how she listens in real life.”

Naomi Watts, who plays Larson’s mother in The Glass Castle, shares a similar career trajectory with Larson, having broken out in a smaller film (David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive) before starring in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. “I’ll never forget, the first day Brie and I were on set together, we did this scene, and she had literally one line. I was bowled over with how much power could be in this tiny little moment. It was so magnetic. Just what goes on behind her eyes.”

Like Samuel L. Jackson, Watts marveled at Larson’s humility and earnestness. “Brie is totally down to earth, charming, and unspoiled,” Watts says. “She’s already surpassed that precarious thing that can transpire after winning an Oscar . . . . She’s balancing it well. For God’s sake, she just directed a film.” These qualities, along with an unforced elegance, made Larson a natural to play an idealistic, anti-war photojournalist in Kong: Skull Island. She was working on Kong while juggling the awards circuit for her Room performance. That meant flying between shoots in Australia and Vietnam and award ceremonies in Los Angeles, New York, and London. Larson powered through the grueling travel schedule—and the constant changes from couture to cargo pants—with good cheer. “I thought it was fun that I didn’t have to be this pristine creature,” she says of her role as photographer Mason Weaver. “It would’ve been a big shock for me to go into my first big studio movie and there’s tons of conversations about my hair and eyeliner. It was so much more comfortable to be a character covered in dirt and grime. That felt right.”

Larson’s attitude and dynamism are exactly what Marvel Studios was looking for when it approached her to front its next big franchise, due to start filming in early 2018. “Captain Marvel has powers that far surpass many of her heroic counterparts, and in order to bring this superhero to life and make her relatable and disarming we needed an actress with both range and humanity,” Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios and producer of all its films, tells me. “So, like the best of our leading characters who have brought the Marvel Universe to life, Brie possesses the depth and energy that can fuse firepower, guts, and a great story.”

While flattering, being the face of a franchise of this magnitude is a daunting endeavor, and Larson didn’t automatically say yes, even though being a superhero can be supremely lucrative. (Industry speculation is that Larson’s salary probably does not top $5 million at this point, but she’ll likely appear in other Marvel movies and, depending on the structure of her deals, could easily make many millions more.) She and fiancé Alex Greenwald, the lead singer of the rock band Phantom Planet, keep a fairly low profile by today’s standards. The two are happiest at their Hollywood Hills home watching movies, playing video games—Super Mario Maker is her jam—and hanging out with friends. So she worried about the increased exposure, aggressive fans, and social-media trolling that would come with a starring role as a comic-book icon. Making the decision that much more daunting for Larson, Marvel demanded that she discuss the offer with no one.

“It took me a really long time,” she tells me. “I had to sit with myself, think about my life and what I want out of it. Ultimately, I couldn’t deny the fact that this movie is everything I care about, everything that’s progressive and important and meaningful, and a symbol I wished I would’ve had growing up. I really, really feel like it’s worth it if it can bring understanding and confidence to young women—I’ll do it.” So far, Larson has no regrets. Yes, after Marvel’s unveiling of the new Captain Marvel there were some negative comments from the usual dark corners of the Internet, but the actress says she’s excited by the opportunity to shape the portrayal of the superhero and her alter ego, an air-force officer named Carol Danvers.

“They’ve been very open to hearing my thoughts and my take on it, which has been great,” she tells me. “I think that’s why they cast me: I have a lot of similarities to this character”—both are strong women in industries where sexism and gender stereotypes persist—“and they want me to bring that into the movie.”

There was a time in Hollywood when offscreen rivalries between actresses—fueled by fragile egos and fierce competition for roles—were more dramatic than anything audiences witnessed on-screen. Think Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (the subject of Feud, an eight-part television series from auteur Ryan Murphy) or sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland, who had a vigilant rivalry for 60 years. But many of today’s young actresses have largely rejected the notion that one star’s gain is another’s loss. In particular, Larson, Emma Stone, and Jennifer Lawrence—all Oscar winners, all roughly the same age—encourage and support one another and celebrate their successes.

They have actor Woody Harrelson to thank for their friendship. He is the Pied Piper of these young women, having worked with Lawrence on The Hunger Games, Stone on Zombieland, and Larson on Rampart and again on The Glass Castle, and he thought they would all benefit from knowing one another. “It’s hard in this business, especially at that age, to experience celebrity and all the perks and all the temptations of celebrity,” Harrelson tells me. He says of the three actresses, “It’s incredible how they’ve navigated fame and stayed the people they are.”

Harrelson, who has been in the spotlight for more than three decades, going back to his eight-year run on Cheers, believes Stone, Lawrence, and Larson provide one another with support and the occasional dose of tough love. They form “a very tight-knit group who keep them honest and keep their ego in check,” Harrelson says. “You’re still just who you are, but everybody’s wanting to tell you, ‘You’re great, you’re great, you’re great!,’ which is fine. The second you start believing it is when you’re in trouble.”

Larson sometimes found the relentlessness of promoting Room (and her performance in it) particularly isolating. “I felt lonely and bad sometimes. I was embarrassed to keep talking about myself.” That was when her peers instinctively reached out to her.

“Emma wrote this beautiful e-mail out of nowhere, and then one day Jen sent me a text message after she saw Room, and we started talking,” Larson recalls. The note morphed into a text chain with Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer chiming in with words of support.

“That [group of friends] saved my life,” Larson says. “I was able to talk with them about everything that was going on in my life, and it was with people who had been through it before and are also hilarious. That support and acceptance was everything. I was home-schooled, so I didn’t have friends that had the same interests as me, and I found it to be absolutely incredible.”

Lawrence and Larson grew closer last spring when they both found themselves in Montreal filming movies—Larson was working on The Glass Castle and Lawrence on Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!. “We just had a blast together, going to get dinner every Saturday night. It gave us all a chance to connect,” Larson says. The Internet might break if fans ever discover a photo of these gatherings, which Harrelson, who plays Larson’s father in The Glass Castle, does his best to capture. “His phone is ancient,” Larson says with a laugh. “It doesn’t take very good pictures, and it has this huge flash on it. He’s always trying to just sneak a candid picture. He’s like such a dad to all of us.”

Stone and Larson, meanwhile, have bonded over their back-to-back Oscar wins. When Larson was up for best actress, Stone found her before the ceremony and gave her a book called I Can Fly, an elephant totem for her purse, and a good-luck card. “It’s those little things,” Larson recalls warmly.

This year, she had the opportunity to repay the favor by being on hand to support Stone as she took her turn on the best-actress circuit for La La Land, culminating in an Academy Award for best actress. On Oscar night Larson posted a photo on Instagram of her embracing Stone; its caption read: “You know what’s better than winning? Watching your friend win.”

The rest of Larson’s Instagram feed is equally uplifting. After all, she doesn’t have to dig too deep to understand the insecurities and challenges that today’s young people face. An avid reader and journal keeper, Larson has saved her diaries from her youth. “I’ve gone back to the ones when I was really young, and those were really funny because you realize that no matter what age you are, no matter where you are in your life, you’re just going to have a problem,” she says.

She uses social media as platforms for telling stories and providing words of encouragement to followers (700,000-plus on Instagram, more than 500,000 on Twitter). Often actors hire specialists to help them curate their social feeds, but not Larson. She writes and publishes her own content, which varies from embarrassing photos to opinions on current events. She’s even hosted open forums and personally moderated the comments to keep the conversation positive. “Here’s to women,” she wrote on Instagram on International Women’s Day. “Whatever your race, religion, sexual orientation, bank account amount, or documentation—I will spend the rest of my life working to raise you up. 🌈 ” It turns out that Brie Larson doesn’t need a cape to make her a role model.