Brie Larson’s career seems complete with her Oscar, her Marvel movies, and the enormous roles that came later. But every actor has to start somewhere, and Larson’s early Hollywood résumé is considerably different than you might normally expect. Long before she was playing Carol Danvers in the MCU, she was a child performer appearing in some decidedly goofy late-night comedy.
In fact, if you stumbled across the footage today, you might need someone to tell you twice that you’re looking at the future Captain Marvel. There is no superhero costume, no dramatic awards-season performance, and certainly no hint that an Oscar is somewhere down the road. Instead, there’s a very young Larson, a Tonight Show with Jay Leno sketch, and a premise so wonderfully ridiculous that it feels like it could only have existed in the 1990s. And that’s where this story gets fun, because this wasn’t just Larson’s first brush with television. It was the beginning of a career that would eventually take her somewhere nobody watching those old sketches could have predicted.
Brie Larson’s First Tonight Show Sketch Was Malibu Mudslide Barbie
If someone told you that Brie Larson’s early television career involved Malibu Mudslide Barbie, you might assume this was some obscure forgotten children’s program. It was not. It was a parody commercial created for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, back when late-night television could apparently look at a Barbie doll, add a horrifyingly specific product gimmick, and call it entertainment.
Larson was still a child when she began appearing in Leno’s commercial parodies, and the footage is fascinating precisely because it is so far removed from the image audiences eventually developed of her. She wasn’t being introduced as the next great dramatic actress. She was simply a kid doing a comedy bit, surrounded by the strange machinery of late-night television. “Wait, that’s Brie Larson?” is probably the natural reaction for anyone discovering the clip decades later. Yes, it really is. And she would return for more, including the wonderfully named “Roadkill Easy-Bake Oven” sketch. Larson’s early credits also list a Tonight Show appearance as a Girl Scout, making it clear that this wasn’t some one-and-done encounter with Leno.
That makes the old footage more than just a funny piece of celebrity trivia. It captures Larson before the career had a recognizable shape, when getting on television at all was the accomplishment. She was already learning something that would become important much later: how to walk into a completely ridiculous situation, commit to the joke, and sell it.
From Jay Leno’s Weirdest Commercials to Marvel and an Oscar
The funny thing about looking backward at a future star’s earliest work is that the ending is already known. We know where Brie Larson eventually went. She would move from early television appearances into roles on Touched by an Angel, Popular, and Raising Dad, before gradually building the kind of film career that made her much more than a former child actor. And now she’s the one giving superhero acting advice to new hopefuls.
Then came Room, the performance that earned Larson the Academy Award for Best Actress, followed a few years later by her casting as Carol Danvers in Marvel’s Captain Marvel. The MCU role surprised many fans but it also seemed like a part that someone like Larson could easily play. The funny irony about her career is how she didn’t end up in the new Barbie movie—especially as a spoof of her infamous Malibu Mudslide Barbie. That makes those old Leno sketches almost comically difficult to reconcile with the actress audiences know now. Imagine seeing Malibu Mudslide Barbie in the 1990s and somehow predicting everything she’d accomplish. Heck, she’s even been in Fast X.
And that’s part of what makes forgotten early footage of famous actors so much fun. It doesn’t show us the finished star. It shows us the work before the mythology, when the future was still completely undecided. For Larson, that future began with a child, a late-night comedy show, and some very questionable fake commercials.