The character of Elizabeth Zott has been with Brie Larson for longer than any other cast or crewmember of Lessons in Chemistry, the Emmy-nominated Apple TV+ adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’ 2022 novel of the same name.
“Two years before the book was even scheduled to come out, it was sent to me by Jason Bateman and Michael Costigan’s production company, Aggregate, and it was an immediate knowing,” says Larson. “Elizabeth just jumped off the page to me, she was not hard for me to find, and that’s a testament to Bonnie’s book and how incredibly she’s able to write beautifully nuanced characters.”
Zott begins the series as a technician in a chemistry lab after being expelled from her doctoral program for refusing to apologize to her mentor, whom she stabbed with a pencil after he sexually assaulted her. It’s there that she meets researcher Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman) and reluctantly lets down her emotional guard as the two begin a romantic relationship. Yet Zott’s trajectory continues to shift in unexpected ways when Evans dies suddenly, and she finds herself single, pregnant and unemployed as a result of her unmarried status.
“I think one of the great tasks of playing human beings is handling human issues with sensitivity and care so that we can look at them and talk about them and add to this growing conversation of support and care for others,” Larson says of Zott’s journey, which eventually leads her to host the cooking show Supper at Six.
Along the way, Zott grapples with the unpredictability of her circumstances as she learns community is the variable that’s most been missing from her calculated equations about life. Larson’s depiction of that deeply personal experience earned her an Emmy nomination for outstanding lead actress and noted praise from Garmus.
“Once the show was done, Bonnie and I had dinner and she was like, ‘You are Elizabeth,’ ” Larson recalls. “I fell into a pile of goo, and it was like, OK, no one else has to understand it. You get it, so we’re good.”
Lee Eisenberg, who developed the series, has commended how believable you are as a chemist and a professional cook. What was your research process like?
I was talking with a lot of different scientists from very different fields because I was very interested in understanding what day-to-day life is like being a scientist [and about] lab culture, the different hierarchies, the gateways to entry. What’s it like to be in a creative field like science? What does it feel like to be writing in a notebook, staring at a chalkboard, how does that connect to me and my life and how I work? It took me embarrassingly too long to figure out that it’s not dissimilar to me producing a show. Trying to problem-solve, thinking, having eureka moments, we’re exactly the same. And then, honestly, just a lot of cooking. I realized that I didn’t need to go to a culinary school because she was self-taught. So I was cooking every single meal from scratch. My friends, family and neighbors said it was their favorite job I’ve ever prepped for because they were constantly getting very elaborate home-cooked meals.
One of the big differences between you and Zott, you’ve shared, is her lack of emotion. What scenes were particularly difficult for you to hold back on?
Episode three, which is this deep exploration of grief. There are not a lot of people in it. My screen partners are a dog, a frog and an infant, and I felt like at that point I had gone through a lot with Elizabeth. It had been about a month of filming, and there are flashbacks and all kinds of things where you feel her getting chipped away at, and I was ready to cry over anything, really. I was ready to just open it all up and Lee was like, “No, I think you have to keep it in until the very end.” And it felt physically uncomfortable to me. I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve never really felt that before. I was feeling like my body was on fire, like there were these feelings that wanted to come out that couldn’t. It’s interesting when you’re exploring grief through somebody else, you’re surprised by what things make you want to cry and what things don’t. For me, it was thinking about her discovering his apology note and moments of realizing a misconnection. I would go in my tent and just have a cry when I needed to so that I could get it out and start over.
Elizabeth and Calvin’s love story is the anchor of the show. Initially, Pullman was only going to be in three episodes and ultimately was in five. How do you feel that extension added to the impact of their relationship?
The benefit of writing the show as we went along — which was a very strange task, to not have everything prepared before — is it allowed us to go where we needed to go and not anticipate it. For a show that deals with this massive scope of a life, the thing that was so clear in the book that really mattered so much to me in the show was that it was about love. It’s depicting love between lovers, of course, but also friendship and children and dogs and food and this incredible love affair that, despite everything that Elizabeth has gone through, this planet just wants to romance you back into love and she just can’t help it. It goes against everything that she understands in science to be a part of this unqualifiable mystery. It was a really important thing, in talking with people who had experienced grief and loss, that those people never really leave you, and to go back to where we felt like life really opened up to her and return to it again to go, even though we all know that life just keeps moving forward and we don’t get to stop, there are still these people that live in our hearts and minds and they don’t go.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
