Brie Larson's Innate Sex-Appeal

On December 18, 2019, a seismic jiggling event occurred on late-night television: Brie Larson guest-hosted the Jimmy Kimmel Show. It was, on paper, expected to be a seemingly unremarkable event. Celebrities have long guest-hosted talk shows before, and Brie Larson was simply another in a long line of other talented, personable celebrities to do the job. 

But then, at approximately 11:35 pm, Pacific Standard Time, Larson stepped out onto the stage and showed the world that she was indisputably not only one of the best actors working but also had one of the best bodies in town. The town being Los Angeles, Hollywood, California, which is why when I say, "best bodies in town," understand I am aware of the competition pool. Yes, it's a bit of a hyperbole, but only a mild one.

What followed was a show that would become one of the most gif-ed episodes of late-night TV in modern history. 

For a little over an hour, Brie Larson unveiled a side of her we rarely saw-or have seen since. A pity, for the side we saw put Larson among the rarefied talents of having both the tits and the talent. But above all, it was Brie herself who embodied a kind of wholesome sexiness we haven’t seen since Pamela Anderson on “Baywatch”. 

It should be noted that Pamela Anderson on “Baywatch” is different from Pamela Anderson everywhere else. “Baywatch,” the show was awash in the oft misconstrued and misunderstood “male gaze”, a vestigial relic of a term steeped in gender essentialism. "Baywatch" itself is an antiquated version of what producer Aaron Spelling termed “jiggle TV”. (My favorite kind of TV.) But the sexiness on “Baywatch” wasn’t sleazy or even all that controversial; there was a wholesomeness to it, a healthy embrace of not only sex but sexuality as a whole, along with indulging in the simple joys of watching pretty people tackle problems ranging from life-threatening to having your lifetime supply of A&W Cream Soda stolen.

The wholesome, horny-on-main that "Baywatch" embodies was on full and breathless display that night. Larson was on fire, handling the opening monologue and interviews with the aplomb of a seasoned pro. Yet, if we are to talk about that night, that moment where she damn near broke the internet, and kept a diverse audience on the edge of their seat, we have to talk about that dress. That infamous black dress that is so jaw-dropping, visually arresting, and plainly put, hot as ever-loving-fuck. 

The dress fused itself into the cultural zeitgeist. Hell, the dress has its own Instagram, its own TikTok, and a subreddit. It's a dress so intimately woven to its wearer that it's impossible to conceive of anyone else wearing it.

It is a masterpiece of form and function. Both teasingly showing off Larson’s curves while maintaining a sense of old-school Hollywood elegance. Above all, the dress highlights the most slept on aspect of Brie’s body: her showstopping rack.

The nation as a whole discovered Larson has a "sleeper rack". Sweet Jebus, how she incurred such an online wrath is beyond me. Brie Larson might be the best proportioned actor in all of Hollywood right now, and you would never know it if it weren’t for this blessed hour of television. 

Consider how the Alessandra Rich masterpiece conforms to Brie's contours while allowing for freedom of movement. That jaw-dropping plunging neckline that left audience members breathless. A neckline so steep you don't need a sherpa to see Brie isn't wearing a bra. Or how about those ornate oversized buttons that start just under that breathtaking cleavage and force the eye to travel down her immaculate torso until you reach the slit at her hem. A slit that starts at her hip and goes all the way down, showing off a delicious pair of toned stems, topped off in a pair of Miu Miu stiletto heels that made sure those gazongas shook with every step.

Brie Larson, braless, sporting immaculate cleavage, and wearing stiletto heels, all while gifting us a dazzling smile. A pop-culture moment that awoke more than a few fetishes, I am sure.

The Alessandra Rich dress is a masterpiece, much like Brie’s figure. But what makes the dress pop is more than Brie’s cup size. For if all she had done was wear the dress, the show wouldn’t have been as memorable. Brie Larson wasn’t flaunting her body, no, she was flaunting her personality. 

Much of what makes Brie’s episode of Kimmel so fun is how effervescent she is, how excited she is, how it's impossible not to notice how good a time she’s having. A good time she’s having, partially, because she is on display-and what a display! 

 Brie’s joy is the key element to her allure. It’s why she, the dress, and this moment are so lodged into the amygdala of cultural memory. She’s having fun.

Brie Larson is into this! She's reveling in the performance. There’s a tease to the way she interacts with the guests, a flirtatious edge to her banter not unlike Craig Ferguson. She’s hot, she knows it, and she's not ashamed.  

It’s a balancing act we wouldn’t see until Sydney Sweeney. But with Larson, the sex appeal is warm and comforting, as opposed to Sweeney’s, which is all-consuming and incendiary. The difference is that Sweeney is inscrutable, whereas Larson is an open book. 

By herself, Brie Larson was a beacon of sexuality on late-night TV. But there is another component, one last piece de resistance: the indisputable craftsmanship of her cleavage. A sight so sublime and visually arresting, it surely must have given a bump to the old Nielsen ratings. 

Cleavage is an art form, practically an aesthetic, my favorite kind. To see the art form of cleavage practiced with brash confidence and deft class, it would be a sin not to remark on it. Brie Larson's cleavage, on average, is always top-shelf. But that night, it was eye-popping. Not only was she bold in her display, but also in how she and the camera crew worked to make sure they were always in frame. A more prideful, excited, uninhibited display from anyone, much less Brie Larson, is so rare that it feels like it should be preserved in amber.

She turned Jimmy Kimmel Live into her very own "jiggle TV". That night, in a dress culled from wet dreams, she debuted a dangerous, bold, teasing, playful side. I'm only semi-kidding about the dangerous bit because the faith she and her team must have had in that dress and the boob tape-zounds! Her dress allowed for so much sway and bounce, it’s a miracle-and a shame-nothing popped out. 

I curse the heavens that she didn't get her own show. Instead, all she got was a role of a lifetime and the chance to star in a movie that made over a billion dollars, kay sera sera.

While her breasts stole the show, what helped them pull off the theft was Larson’s other ace-in-the-hole: her personality. Her coy smile belied the wholesomeness of her pin-up image. She was on fire that night. Every aspect of her image seemed meticulously thought out.

Her hair hung down to her shoulder in waves, resting against her healthy chest, once more drawing your eyes to her ripe casaba melons. From time to time, she would flip her hair, causing her breasts to sway in tandem with the earrings. It also made it seem as if her breasts were waving at the audience. I wonder if anyone waved back?

Even her glittery, dangling earrings gently guided your eyes downward to the true twin jewels of her breasts. There was more than a bit of the burlesque to Brie’s performance that night. Rest assured, that is exactly what it was, a performance of both gender and sexuality. 

She flirted with us, the audience, as well as the guests. It was a brash, larger-than-life performance. Yes, she's inviting us to look, but in a way that never feels taboo. It's a disarming display of what we mean by "sex is natural," in which she implies with every shot of her cleavage or every fit of delighted giggling, that what makes her sexy isn't that she's objectifying herself, but that she's expressing herself.

It's why with Larson, you feel welcomed to look. She does more than hint that it's okay when she brings on Molly Hopkins, a woman who can guess bra sizes merely by looking at breasts. A superpower many of us wish we possessed. (And one I'd love to see in either the MCU or the DCEU.) Larson even jokes, “I’ve made it easy for you,” as she straightens her back and thrusts out her hefty honkers. There’s a knowing coyness to her Jean Harlowe-inspired sultriness.  

This, in essence, is the key to Larson’s sexiness overall. There’s an approachability, tinged with old-school glamour, topped off by a cheerful swagger to her demeanor. Larson moves and talks with confident ease, using her supernova smile with laser-like precision. She has no fear of looking silly or goofy, an integral part of being a sex symbol, if only because so much of acting sexy, if done with the slightest miscalculation, can often come off as silly. Brie Larson, for an hour, successfully brewed an alchemy of glamour, ebullience, and coquettish teasing that left a nation breathless. 

Larson is such a goofball, it's a wonder where the incels and other online bullies ever got the idea she was some sort of fire-breathing harridan hellbent on destroying comic book movies. It's a little ironic that the same people who claim Brie Larson is trying to take sex out of the MCU miss that she has actually put sex back into the MCU. Few MCU stars are able to look that devastatingly hot in a baseball cap, "Nine Inch Nails" tee, and a bomber jacket. Yet, Larson wears it, and it's, no joke, one of the sexiest fucking things in the entire MCU.

It is a crying shame that the industry has, instead of capitalizing on one of the hottest talents, both figure-wise and talent-wise, seems bent on shackling her to MCU cape-shit slop; multi-million-dollar bushels designed to hide her blazing flame. Neither the script nor the outfit for Captain Marvel does Larson any favors, though she does her best to overcome both. Truth be told, Larson's body is so fire even in a full-body suit, you can't help but let out a whistle.

Larson enjoys the performance both on and off stage. Observe how she teased the now-infamous white crop top she wears in the Marvels. She humble bragged posted a picture of the top on her Instagram. Larson even went into detail about how she made it happen and the teamwork it took to pull it off. Larson is transparent in how she utilizes clothes to highlight what she believes is her best feature, outside of her smile, her sleeper rack. By doing this, she also shows how these outfits take work; they do not simply happen. These outfits are often discussed with a conceit in mind, a goal to their design and execution. 

She's not interested in destroying the fantasy so much as showing how it's crafted. With Larson, being sexy isn’t a form of objectification; it's about a celebration of self. The white-crop top is a perfect example. It shows off her well-earned and much-publicized buff physique. Unlike Kimmel, there's a hint of tomboyishness there. Here, "feminine" isn't a definitive gender, as much as it is a way of expressing oneself and sexuality, using the constructs of the culture to craft herself in her own image.

Marvels was directed by Nia DaCosta, who, along with Larson and the costume designer Lindsay Pugh, crafted one of the most memorable outfits of the entire MCU. An outfit that, if you saw it on the BIG screen, was up there with Halle Berry coming out of the ocean in Die Another Day. For a fleeting moment, Larson brought her innate sexuality to the mire of cinematic puritanism of the MCU. Seeing her in that white-crop top, her breast straining against the material, was like the Kool-Aid man crashing through a brick wall.

Okay, granted, it's not early 90s Lara-Croft levels of sexy, but compared to the vast desert of the sexless MCU, it sure feels like it. (This is by no means an erasure of Haley Atwell or Kat Dennings, two women who have done some real heavy lifting in that department. We see you!) Seeing Brie Larson on the big screen, in any movie, is an experience. But seeing her in that white crop top-if you didn’t see it in IMAX 3D- you don’t know what 3D truly means. 

I’d argue that the trio’s collaboration might be one of the best of the entire MCU if only because it’s one of the rare fits that burns itself into your mind once you see it. The sight of Larson in that crop-top sticks to your memory like caramel and is just as sugary sweet. DaCosta must have been impressed with Pugh’s work because she used her for her next movie, Hedda.  

So, when I say Larson enjoys the performance of femininity, I mean it not in the traditional sense, but in the sense that gender is performance. A fact evident by how she shaved her head to play in a punk-rock adaptation of Elektra. Larson hasn't stopped playing with the performance; she has merely found a new avenue in which to express herself. Even with a shaved head she's still one of the sexiest stars in Hollywood.

Who knows what this new era of Brie Larson's career will bring? What will be the black dress of this era? My God, I can't wait.

Images courtesy of Randy Holmes, ABC, and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures