Sure, Oscar winner Brie Larson was thrilled to get an Emmy nomination for playing Elizabeth Zott in Apple TV+’s Lessons in Chemistry. But it’s the show’s nine other nominations—including one for outstanding limited series—that are the real highlights for Larson.

That’s because Larson is also an executive producer on the series, and has been deeply involved in the adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’s best-selling novel since the beginning. “It really did feel different, and I don’t think I could have anticipated that until it was happening,” Larson tells Little Gold Men of the show’s nomination for best limited series. “Even just writing a statement afterward was a really overwhelming experience, because it’s very different when you’re just speaking for yourself. But when you feel like, ‘Dang, like I know these people,’ it feels amazing to see them be uplifted.”

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Larson stars as Elizabeth, a chemist in the 1950s who falls in love with her colleague Calvin Evans (played by Lewis Pullman). But when Calvin unexpectedly dies, Elizabeth’s employer fires her after learning that she’s pregnant out of wedlock. Her fate takes another unexpected turn when she combines her love of chemistry with her knack for cooking as the host of a television show called Supper at Six. It’s a decades-spanning story that sees Elizabeth fight against the sexism of the era while also grappling with loss and her late partner’s mysterious past.

Larson found it difficult to step into the mind of a scientist, and became obsessed with getting it right, as she tells Little Gold Men (listen below). She also reveals what it’s like to be back in awards season, and what she learned from making a YouTube channel during the pandemic.

Vanity Fair: You had to get a lot right on Lessons in Chemistry: the time period, the science aspect of the book, the cooking part of the show. What did you find most intimidating about having to be all these things as Elizabeth Zott?

Brie Larson: The hardest part was playing the scientist. What does it feel like to be in a laboratory? What are the quiet moments? What does that look like? What does it feel like? I was able to speak with a lot of various scientists in different fields. I’m very lucky that I even have friends in the scientific community, but there’s always something that gets in your head before a job—I think it’s like a way of exercising all these feelings of just fear and nervousness and the chaos of creativity, and it usually just funnels into like one specific thing. And for me, I just kept obsessing over what it would be like to make a discovery. I just couldn’t quite understand what I would do in that situation. For some reason, it just felt like the most impossible thing for me to try and understand.

Then there was a day, maybe it was like day three or so on set when Lewis [Pullman] and I were doing a scene, and something was off, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I pulled out my script and I started flipping through it. I guess I stared off into space for a while—and then suddenly it hit me that we made a glitch in the timeline. I came back, and Lewis was like, “That was it. I just watched a scientist: You were going through your research, going through your notes, and then just like that, you were up and you were excited.” I was like, “Oh my gosh.” There are these moments that just make you humbled and laugh because you’re like, “Why did I spend so much time obsessing over something that was so far away from my experience when it was right there?”

Elizabeth suffers a great loss on the show. How do you as an actor carry the grief of a character while you’re shooting? How does it affect your body or your general sense of self while you’re shooting something like that?

I found the grief episode to be just physically really painful to do. It felt like my body was on fire. Sometimes I’d feel really sick, like I was gonna throw up. I hate talking about this stuff because it sounds so remarkably overdramatic, but it was a very interesting thing. I think part of it was because [showrunner] Lee [Eisenberg] had the grand idea that Elizabeth was still not going to show emotion, even through this grief—that she was just going to be sort of numb and shut down. That just couldn’t be further from who I am. I cry so easily, it’s shocking. So I think that it was the feeling of stuffing down emotions that I just never ever stuffed down.

You went through awards season with Room. How do you approach this part of your job, the promotion and awards circuit?

It kind of depends on what it is. Listen, this is basically my second rodeo. It’s not like I do this every year.

Your first rodeo, you won an Oscar, but sure.

Let me tell you, it was a fabulous rodeo. I loved that rodeo. With this one, the unique aspect of it is that the show came out during the strike. We weren’t able to promote it. We didn’t have a premiere. So it feels like a celebration of the work, and we could definitely kill a couple of bottles of wine and a bottle of tequila while hanging out anytime. It’s so hard to make anything, and it’s so rare to be recognized—television especially is just remarkably hard. And I think there’s just so much good television that to be plucked out of that, and to be among the select few that gets to be part of this, it’s just overwhelming and humbling to me.

Elizabeth Zott has to fight against intense sexism, and you also have had to face that as a part of the Marvel universe. I’m curious if you felt any connection there.

I think the thing with that is that I have been underestimated. That was a huge part of reading the novel for me, was feeling that I’m united in this human struggle of being told that you can’t do something when you know deep in your heart you can and you will. I will always feel a kinship with her in that way.

How protective do you feel over characters you’ve played, like Elizabeth Zott or Captain Marvel?

I feel like it depends. I feel like somebody asked me something about “What would Elizabeth say is her favorite TikTok trend?” or something and I was like, “How dare you?” [Laughs.] There are certain things where I don’t want to reduce her to that. She would never! But I remember very early on in my career, I was on a TV show and this new director came in and gave me a note that I felt was not correct, congruent with the character. So I called the other director and said, “I don’t want to be disrespectful, but I don’t know what to do.” And he said, “You have to protect her.” And that always stuck with me. I do feel like this character is the embodiment of something that is my responsibility to care for.

During the pandemic, you had a YouTube channel, which was an interesting endeavor for you while no one was working. What did you learn from making it?

The YouTube channel was for this very specific thing in me. I had this obsession—where I didn’t want anybody to know anything about me. I thought, Oh, if people know me, then they’ll never believe me as any character. And during the pandemic, with just so much time alone to myself in the silence, I realized that the thing [that was] holding [me] back was the fear of rejection as myself. Rejecting me as a character or an embodiment of some sort of idea, I can brush that off no problem. But gosh, it’s painful to be misunderstood as a person. I mean, it’s just one of the great horrors. So it was a challenge to myself to say, can I do one video a week for a year and just see what happens? And the greatest thing happened, which is that no one cared. [Laughs.] It was amazing. I mean, people subscribe to the channel, I don’t mean to say that no one looked at it. But it was amazing to realize I can put myself out there and it’s really not that big of a deal. That felt freeing for myself.