Elizabeth Olsen is used to waiting in the wings. While an acting student at New York University, she landed an understudy role in the Broadway play “Impressionism,” starring Jeremy Irons. The show ran for 56 performances. Olsen never once took the stage.
Such a missed opportunity can confuse an actress, but Olsen was never in a hurry to grab the spotlight. Years later, when she was cast as the reality-bending witch Wanda Maximoff in “Avengers: Age of UltronHer character was more of a sideshow Avenger than the main event, and in three subsequent Marvel movies — each featuring a more overcrowded ensemble of superheroes than the last — Olsen never rose above billing 10.
But something funny happened after all this time of waiting:WandaVision‘, a sitcom parody of Wanda and her Android husband, became an unexpected phenomenon when it debuted on Disney+ early last year. This month, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness‘, which Olsen considers co-lead and pits her troubled witch against Benedict Cumberbatch’s goatee wizard, has proved even more important. the film $185 Million Raised in its first three days of release, ranked 11th among the greatest domestic opening weekends of all time.
For Olsen, who initially made her mark in independent films, this is the equivalent of turning a comic book page to find yourself the subject of a huge splash panel. During a video call last week, I asked what it felt like to step into the limelight as a blockbuster leading lady.
“I’m all mortified!” she said. “I’m not going to watch it.”
Hours after we spoke, Olsen was due to walk the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” but she planned to flee the theater once the movie started. “This is the pressure I feel for the first time,” she explained. “I’m very concerned about the arrival of ‘Doctor Strange’ because I’ve never really had to direct a commercial film on my own.”
She coughed as she unwrapped a foil wrapper: “Sorry, I have a lozenge.”
Casual and friendly, Olsen, 33, exudes a California glow so powerful you’d hardly know she’d been sick for days. “It’s just annoying,” she said, drinking water from a Mason jar. “I think my body really wants to relax.” She embarked on this worldwide press tour the day after she completed a seven-and-a-half-month shoot for the HBO series “Love and Death,” the kind of overcrowded schedule that also required her to film “WandaVision” and “Doctor.” Strange” back to back.
Since her ‘Doctor Strange’ director, Sam Raimi, hadn’t seen all of ‘WandaVision’ when filming began, it was up to Olsen to lead the tricky line through the two projects. In the Disney+ series, Wanda is so bereft after the death of her true love, Vision (Paul Bettany), that she invents an extended sitcom reality in which he still lives, then adds two children to complete the illusion. But in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” she takes a much more difficult turn: spoiled by a demonic spellbook, Wanda breaks down the bad and strangles a cast of good guys while on a multiverse-spanning journey to find her children.
Olsen “is scary, not because of her destructive powers or her diabolical ambitions, but because she’s so sad,” our critic AO Scott wrote† And if you’re still sympathetic to Wanda as she minces our heroes, it’s Olsen’s efforts to anchor the character into something that feels specific and intimate. When Wanda utters a deadly threat, Olsen lets her voice soften and her eyes fill with tears and regret: There’s a real person in there. (While other actresses in the super-villain realm tend to camp, Olsen understands that when you’re soaring in the air and wearing a red tiara, things are bow enough.)
But six Marvel projects in, is this the kind of big screen career she expected? Not exactly.
“It took me away from the physical ability to do certain jobs that I thought were more in line with the things I enjoyed as a spectator,” Olsen said. “And this is me who is the fairest.”
OLSEN HAD KNOWN she wanted to act since she was a kid, but she also knew she didn’t want to act if a child. Any curiosity she might have had about fame was appeased by growing up alongside her sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley, who were cast in “Full House” before they were even a year old. The life-changing control of stardom could wait.
Anyway, she felt much more comfortable in a group. Olsen played volleyball in high school and created camaraderie on the team: Everyone could have their solo moment, but they had to work together to succeed. Even in college, when she began to audition for films, she was in no hurry to leave the theater ensemble with which she got through school.
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But film acting isn’t always egalitarian. In 2011, Olsen stormed the Sundance Film Festival with a few star vehicles: “Silent House,” a one-shot thriller that keeps the lens on her for 87 minutes, and “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” portraying her as an ex-cult member struggling to move on. That one-two punch led people to call her Park City’s “it girl,” but when movers and shakers lined up in the snow to meet her, Olsen didn’t trust anything they said.
“It really felt like everyone was talking through both sides of their mouths,” she said. “I was like, ‘This is a bubble.’ It felt like I was literally in a snow globe.”
She came out of that experience and knew only two things: She didn’t want to be characterized as the crying indie girl, but she also didn’t want to be immediately pushed into big-budget movies. “That seemed scary to me, that kind of pressure,” she said.
Still, sometimes it’s nice to be invited to the party. A few years into her acting career, after a string of quiet indies, she asked her agent why she was never in the running for higher profile movies. The answer: “People don’t think you want to do them.”
Did she? That’s a question Olsen had to ask herself then – and she still does, from time to time. She decided she needed to bring herself out more and signed on for a remake of 2014’s “Godzilla”, reasoning that at least it was directed by Gareth Edwardswho had hitherto been an independent filmmaker.
And then came the role of Wanda, and with her, entry into Hollywood’s biggest franchise. As Olsen considered Marvel’s offer to star in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” she listed the benefits: It would defy her indie typecasting. She would be part of an ensemble again, albeit with superpowers. And her “Godzilla” opponent Aaron Taylor-Johnson was willing to come on board as Wanda’s brother, Pietro, to make sure she didn’t go it alone. They signed up to “Ultron” as a couple.
But Pietro was murdered at the end of that movie, and as a horrified Wanda continued through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wondering if she really fit in, Olsen pondered the same question. Due to her Marvel obligations, she had to turn down a starring role in the film Yorgos Lanthimos dark comedy “The Lobster,” and it didn’t take a multiverse for Olsen to imagine how that movie would have propelled her down a completely different path as an actress.
“I started to feel frustrated,” she said. “I had this job security, but I lost these pieces that I felt were more of a part of my being. And the further I got from there, the less eligible I was.”
Her initial contract with Marvel included two lead roles and a cameo, although Marvel movies are so gigantic that the studio could have considered the five weeks Olsen spent filming “Captain America: Civil War” as a brief appearance. And while her soaring profile helped indie movies like “Wind River” and “Ingrid goes westfunded, she still wondered if Wanda’s spell was worth it in the end. Had she become typecast in a completely different way? And did it all build into something that mattered?
Wanda was murdered at the end of ‘Avengers: Infinity War’, fulfilling Olsen’s three-film contract. “The power to choose to continue was important to me,” she said. And around the time the head of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, brought in Olsen to discuss a resurrection for “Avengers: Endgame,” he pitched “WandaVision” to her. At first she wondered if it was a downgrade: TV, really? But the more she wrapped her head around it, the more she realized this was her wildest movie opportunity yet.
“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” is said to be Marvel’s first Disney+ series, an old-fashioned, down-the-middle action show where the superheroes beat evildoers in every hour-long episode. In contrast, “WandaVision” was a half-hour sitcom parody; the show’s main fights were marital squabbles, leavened by a creepy laugh track.
“We thought what we were doing was so weird and we didn’t know if we had an audience for it, so there was a freedom to it,” Olsen said. “There was no pressure, no fear. It was a very healthy experience.”
But after the pandemic prompted Marvel to change the order of its Disney+ series, “WandaVision” went first and became the unlikely standard bearer. The show spawned countless memes, crashed the streaming service multiple times, and earned 23 Emmy nominationsincluding a best actress nod to Olsen.
More importantly, “WandaVision” helped her fall in love with Wanda for the very first time – a character she had played for years. The show offered a dizzying array of variations on the role—some sitcom sparkly, others modern and somber—and the first episode, shot in front of a live audience, required all of Olsen’s theatrical training to succeed. She wasn’t sure if it would resonate with a wider audience until friends sent her video clips from a brunch in Minneapolis where drag queens had dressed up as all of Wanda’s alter egos. “When you get to that stage,” Olsen said with a laugh, “you’re actually part of the culture.”
With Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow out of the pictureOlsen is now the Marvel actress with the most hours clocked. After ‘WandaVision’ and ‘Doctor Strange’, does she feel so revitalized that she would be willing to star in a solo film about her character?
“I think I would,” she said. “But it has to be a good story. I think these movies are best if it’s not about creating content, but about having a really strong point of view – not because you need a three-shot plan.”
Now that she’s more comfortable in her signature role and in her own skin, Olsen wants to be more aware of her role choice and what she’s doing with it. But she also told me a story from her college days about Jeremy Irons, who didn’t fully learn his lines until the opening night of “Impressionism”; even through previews, he’d scurry around for the audience, leave the stage to peruse his pages, and then come back to mucking some more. Maybe acting wasn’t something you were trapped, pinned down, and studied obsessively, Olsen realized at the time. Perhaps you could embrace it as a flowing thing with an unknown destination.
Olsen now knows that a Hollywood career can take turns you never could have predicted, so you might as well enjoy where it’s going. Over the weekend, she appeared on “Saturday Night Live” to support her co-star Benedict Cumberbatch† she played herself the sketch, while the show’s Chloe Fineman played Olsen’s understudy. Sometimes things go around like this. Sometimes it even feels like magic.
