Hawkeye actor Jeremy Renner rebuked Captain Marvel actress Brie Larson in a recent interview promoting the upcoming Marvel Studios epic Avengers: Endgame.
In an interview with NDTV, Renner and Larson are asked by NDTV’s Rohit Khilnani about the responsibility of being a celebrity and actor in the Marvel Studios films.
Larson answers first saying, “I am committed to self-improvement and I work at being the best person I can be and using this platform for as much good as I can. It doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes, but I’m very comfortable with that and allowing myself to learn from those mistakes.”
Hawkeye’s Jeremy Renner would then respond, where he rebuked Larson’s idea of using her platform as a celebrity, “I’m pretty accountable and responsible in my own life at any rate. Celebrity isn’t something that I use as any sort of platform to be more responsible or accountable, I suppose. It’s certainly an absolute blessing to see the joy on kids’ faces. I don’t think there is a feeling that comes close to that.”
Larson made it abundantly clear while promoting Captain Marvel that she planned to use her fame as the actress behind Captain Marvel to push her own agenda. In an interview with Marvel’s Vice President of Content and Character Development Sana Amanat for InStyle, Larson would confirm taking on Captain Marvel was her “form of activism.”
She would states, “The movie was the biggest and best opportunity I could have ever asked for. It was, like, my superpower. This could be my form of activism: doing a film that can play all over the world and be in more places than I can be physically.”
As for the type of activism she would be promoting, she would elaborate in other interviews. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Larson declared that not only is the year 2019 about intersectional feminism, but that Captain Marvel was about intersectional feminism.
“I think because it’s 2019, and what 2019 is about, really, is intersectional feminism. There’s just no question that we would have to show what it means to be all different kinds of women, that we don’t just have one type. It became a great opportunity, even with things like the love story. [We wanted] to make that big love— that lost love, that love that’s found again—be with [Carol’s] best friend. To show that, that’s incredibly powerful and gripping, and you could go to the ends of the Earth and fight till the end for your best friend. It’s perfect to me and so meaningful. To me, that’s a part of what the meditation of this movie is: It’s female strength, but what is female strength? What are the different ways that can look?”
Larson also revealed that Marvel Studios approached her to make Captain Marvel into a “big feminist movie.” Larson told Entertainment Tonight, ““I had a meeting with Marvel and what we discussed is they wanted to make a big feminist movie.”
Larson has also made it clear that she doesn’t want to hear certain people’s voices when it comes to film criticism. At the Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards in Los Angeles in 2018, Larson declared, “I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time. It wasn’t made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color, to teens that are biracial.” She also specifically called for organizations to set aside a specific number of press passes for “underrepresented critics.” She specifically pointed to Sundance’s commitment of 20%.
Larson would later walk back those comments after she faced intense criticism, stating she wanted to bring more seats to the table. At Tina Brown’s Women in the World conference in New York, Larson noted:
“I think it’s important for me to state that no one’s losing a chair. We’re just adding more chairs. That meant for me taking more time on my press days. Adding more hours to my day to make sure all those voices were in. Because I’m not trying to exclude anyone. The importance is to lift up more voices. Then it sort of spiraled from there. I realized there were so many other ways that I could do this whether it was trying to reach parity with the female to male designers that I wore. Making sure that I had people of color behind the camera as well, taking and doing photos for magazine shoots. It sort of spiraled from there into this thing where it opened this new world for me. I had such an incredible time on this press tour because of it.”
Jeremy Renner isn’t the only Avengers: Endgame cast member who Brie Larson appears to have rubbed wrong. Larson and Thor actor Chris Hemsworth also got into a contentious debate during an Avengers: Endgame interview where Larson stated, “I feel like we are fighting right now. I think it’s been an all day thing.”
What do you make of Jeremy Renner’s rebuke of Larson’s idea of celebrity?