Elizabeth Olsen’s “awful” 2010 audition for an iconic role: “I didn’t get a callback”
Elizabeth Olsen could have played one of the most controversial fantasy roles of all time.
Having one of the most ideal careers of a contemporary movie star, Olsen has been able to pursue unusual and personal projects, given that she always has her role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to fall back on.
She has been fairly outspoken about how she feels about some of the recent developments with her character, Wanda Maximoff, specifically in the polarising film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. However, being part of a consistent series has ensured that she has the freedom to make smaller films that are decidedly less commercial, with The Assignment and Ingrid Goes West being two recent examples.
Olsen got her role in the MCU at the right time in her career. Although she had given a breakout performance in the independent drama Martha Marcy May Marlene that earned her Academy Award buzz, she had two major flops with Silent House and Oldboy, and hence landing Wanda, the superhero known as Scarlet Witch, gave her a fan-favourite part in Avengers: Age of Ultron that she would continue playing for the next decade.
However, prior to the moment when the MCU really started to look like a ‘big deal’, the actor revealed that she read for a role in one of the most successful HBO shows of all time.
“I auditioned for Game of Thrones,” Olsen admitted, “I auditioned for, like, the assistant to the casting director in a small room in New York with just a camera on me, and them reading the script. I was doing the Khaleesi speech when she comes out of the fire. It was awful. I didn’t get a callback.”
The part of Daenerys Targaryen would eventually go to Emilia Clarke, who earned a significant amount of praise for her performance, but Game of Thrones took a very different trajectory when the show ran out of books to adapt, given that George RR Martin had not completed any new instalments in the series since the first season was released. As a result, the showrunners had to start creating their own story, which led to disastrous results when the massively panned last season came out.
Although no one could blame Clarke, who gave a great performance throughout the entire run, the direction of Daenerys’ character felt awkward, particularly in the penultimate episode, ‘The Bells’. She also didn’t get a lot of great roles outside of Game of Thrones, both during and after its run on HBO, with Terminator: Genisys, a potential franchise starter, being a flop, Last Christmas standing as one of the worst holiday comedies of all time, and her own entry into the MCU as part of the Disney+ series Secret Invasion being terribly received.
Comparatively, Olsen actually was able to do some great work on television when she wasn’t under the pressure of being on a series as significant as Game of Thrones. Although a vast majority of the Marvel shows that aired on Disney+ have been disappointing, the actor was highly impressive on WandaVision, a dark comedy that showed how Wanda had built a false reality in her mind in order to cope with the loss of her true love, Paul Bettany’s Vision.
