Brie Larson has a new “Muppet” in her life: Her rescue dog.
“He’s so cute and I’m sorry to have kept him from you, but his name is Six-Thirty,” the Oscar winner, 34, said during a Friday, November 10, appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
Lessons in Chemistry fans know that this particular moniker has a sweet connection to the AppleTV+ show, based on the same book by Bonnie Garmus. In the show, Larson’s character, chemist Elizabeth Zott, named her dog Six-Thirty because the pup followed her home at that time.
Larson, for her part, worried that discussing her real-life pooch publicly would be “breaking the [SAG-AFTRA] strike” because of its connection to the series. (The SAG-AFTRA strike officially came to an end on November 9.)
“I did not pick his name. He picked it, [but] I just don’t have the heart to tell him that it’s just totally absurd and inappropriate,” she joked, noting that Six-Thirty was “very shy” when he was rescued.
“My friends were throwing out, like, everything under the sun,” she noted to host Jimmy Fallon. “And my best friend, who is a food consultant on [my new show] Lessons in Chemistry, she saw him and was like, ‘Oh, my gosh! He’s Six-Thirty!’ And he looked up.”
Larson thought the moniker choice, while it captivated the pooch, was “too strange.” But when she said, “Six-Thirty” several more times, he kept responding to it — unlike anything else she attempted to call him.
“I tried everything. I had four days where I was calling him Dog, Jeremy, Jimmy, David,” the Marvels star lamented. “I’d be opening the pantry and be like, ‘Are you flour? Are you salt? Are you black pepper?’”
She continued: “He chose it, so please just be respectful when you see him.”
While Larson and Six-Thirty have made their peace with the decision, the pet’s veterinarian wasn’t as understanding.
“His vet thinks it’s ridiculous. His vet is confused,” Larson remarked. “The receptionist would go, ‘Your Six-Thirty’s here.’ And he’s like, ‘It’s 2:00, I don’t know what that means.’ It’s confusing.”
While Larson is a proud dog mom, she won’t be getting a cat anytime soon — despite her onscreen character Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers’ sidekick, Goose.
“I’m still allergic,” she quipped to Entertainment Weekly in an interview published in July, noting she couldn’t do her MCU stunts when the feline was present. “I hope that changes. But until it does, a lot of the CGI budget goes towards me and the cat.”
In both Captain Marvel and sequel The Marvels — which came out on Friday — Larson’s titular superhero finds a special bond with a flerken named Goose. Per comic lore, a flerken is an alien species that looks like a cat but has hundreds of tentacles in their mouth — which can come in handy when fighting bad guys.
