Brie Larson spent her 2020 mixing up content for her YouTube channel, but now she’s ready to get back in the lab over at Apple+. According to Variety, the Captain Marvel actress will executive-produce and star in Lessons in Chemistry, a new period drama based on the upcoming titular debut novel from author and science writer Bonnie Garmus; the book is set to be released in the spring of next year. Susannah Grant, the Oscar-nominated writer of 2000’s Erin Brockovich, will pen the series.
Set in the early ’60s, Lessons In Chemistry will follow Larson’s Elizabeth Zott, a scientist who finds her career derailed by single parenthood and the inflexible gender expectations of the time, as she pivots to a profession deemed more appropriate for a woman: hosting a televised cooking show. Latching on to the opportunity, Zott reportedly “sets out to teach a nation of overlooked housewives — and the men who are suddenly listening — a lot more than recipes, all the while craving a return to her true love: science.â€
According to Variety, Larson’s previously announced Apple+ drama, based on the 2019 memoir Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA, by former covert agent Amaryllis Fox, is now on hold indefinitely. So it looks like Brie will be saving the world in a more low-key, “knowledge is power†kind of way rather than her typical “preventing a global catastrophe against the clock†type of deal.