Brie Larson Will Play First Female Presidential Candidate (No, Not Hillary)
We’re so stoked that Brie Larson is going to be portraying the role of the first female U.S. Presidential candidate in the upcoming movie Victoria Woodhull -- which Larson will also produce. The Amazon Studios film is named after its protagonist, the suffragist Victoria Woodhull.
With over 4,500 women recently signed up to run for political office, gender in politics is currently in the spotlight. While Hillary Clinton made history by becoming the first female candidate ever to be endorsed for the office by one of the two major political parties, she is not the first woman to have run for the office.
That honor is reserved for Victoria Woodhull, who ran for the office of the U.S. President in 1872 as a member of the Equal Rights Party -- get this -- even before women had the right to vote in America.
Woodhull is a fascinating character. She ran for the office at the age of 35, making her incredibly young by comparison to most Presidential candidates in modern times. According to her biography in Wikipedia, among Woodhull’s non-political accomplishments were founding one of the first newspapers to ever have been started by a woman and operating the first woman-run brokerage on Wall Street. She did both of these things with her sister.
While we can’t wait to see the movie because Woodhull certainly deserves a more historical recognition for her fight for women’s rights and equality, we’re also really excited to see Larson play this role.
Larson is a feminist who has been active on a number of fronts. She recently interviewed Jane Fonda, who she described how she came to be a feminist, what it was like growing up in the 1950s and where she admitted to be a victim of rape and sexual harassment.
Of course, Larson herself is probably best known for winning an Oscar for her 2015 role in the powerful film “Room,” in which she played a rape victim. Her advocacy and support for victims of sexual assault was in part what caused the media to speculate that in delivering the 2017 Oscar’s award to Casey Affleck, she did not hug or clap for him. Affleck has been accused of sexual harassment and unwanted physical advances by two women with whom he previously worked.
And lest you think Larson’s just about playing strong women, she’s also going to be playing a feminist Captain Marvel in 2019.
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