'Room' Star Brie Larson Tapped Into Her Own Tough Childhood for Her Critically-Acclaimed Performance

Room star Brie Larson never had to endure the nightmarish circumstances forced upon her character Ma, who, when the movie opens, has been held prisoner for seven years in a backyard shed. But the 26-year-old actress was able to tap into personal experiences from her childhood while playing the resilient heroine in the adaptation of the best-selling Emma Donoghue novel.

When Larson was 7, her mother separated from her father, packed up all of their belongings into an old Mercedes, and drove her and her younger sister from Sacramento to Los Angeles, where they rented a tiny studio apartment with a bed that folded up into the wall. “It was not that much bigger than Room,” Larson told Yahoo Movies in an interview (watch above) promoting her new film, which has drawn high praise and early Oscar buzz since its debut at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Related: ‘Room’ Wins Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award

“One night, waking up in the middle of the night — the three of us would all share that bed that came out of the wall — I heard my mom crying with her hands over her mouth, just trying to not let us hear,” Larson remembered. “There was no space for her to be upset or try to figure out what her life was, or who she was now, what she was going to do about us, financially, about the future.”

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In the film, Ma tends to her 5-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) — who was fathered by her abductor/rapist — by mustering up whatever enthusiasm she can to spark his imagination. Each of the small room’s objects and appliances, no matter how mundane, are their friends, and every day they scream toward “the aliens” in the sky.

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Larson’s real-life mom took a similar approach: “She had this tiny room, and what she did is she created an experience of imagination that my sister and I lived in, that then we could pull her into, which I think made that pain a lot easier,” she explained. “And that was something that I wanted to bring to Room.”

Room opens Oct. 16. Watch the trailer: