The first movie Elizabeth Olsen became obsessed with: “You couldn’t peel me away”
Superhero exhaustion is a definite thing these days; it’s a struggle to keep track of Marvel, DC Comics, crossovers, TV series, video game adaptations, animations, different characters, directors doing alternative cuts of their own movies, and it’s something that Elizabeth Olsen acknowledges while still wanting to do more of it.
She’s the actor, after all, who has been deeply involved in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for ten years now, playing Wanda Maximoff/The Scarlett Witch, first in The Avengers movies and then in an inventive spin-off Wandavision, a Disney+ series with Paul Bettany that earned her all kinds of plaudits, including a Primetime Emmy and a Golden Globe nomination.
She reprised the role in the 2022 Doctor Strange movie and is currently voicing the character again in Marvel Zombies, which is an animated series that released this past week. So she’s obviously still keen on slipping on the red robes, saying: “There are still character through lines that have happened in the comics that I’d love to do that I think fans also want to. I mean, these movies aren’t for critics, these movies are for fans.”
Olsen, to be fair to her though, is hardly one-dimensional when it comes to the roles she takes on, for a start she made a brave debut in the gritty psychological thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene in 2011, starring as the escaped cult member suffering paranoid flashbacks and delusions. She again received critical acclaim for her performance in the film, which she made two years before graduating from film school.
She then took on another challenging part with the 2013 remake of Oldboy opposite Josh Brolin. Directed by Spike Lee, the vengeance thriller nevertheless paled into insignificance compared to the 2003 Korean original. She then made her Marvel bow, but probably the pick of her films over the next few years was 2017’s Wind River with Jeremy Renner, a stylish crime thriller with a soundtrack by Nick Cave.
But Olsen ending up in an enormous superhero franchise is not really a surprise when you hear about her major movie influences growing up as a kid obsessed with perhaps the most successful cinema series of all time, Star Wars. Olsen told Collider, “It was actually a funny decision I had put out in the world. I talked to my agent, my manager… And I told them, ‘I want to be considered for the projects that I grew up …’ – like, as a kid, looking at Star Wars and I was obsessed with Star Wars. You couldn’t peel me away from Star Wars as a child.”
Olsen has several projects coming up, but we’d say the pick of them is Flesh of the Gods, a vampire horror co-starring Oscar Isaac and Kristen Stewart set in 1980s Los Angeles that sees a married couple on the loose looking for the taste of blood. She’ll also soon be seen in Panic Carefully, an FBI drama starring Julia Roberts and Eddie Redmayne about the hunt for a cyberterrorist.
Meanwhile, she’s unlikely to be part of the closing Avengers chapter, Doomsday, which is currently in production with Robert Downey Jr starring as ‘Doom’, saying she feels her character’s story is over for now. But if you do want to see her do some brilliant work in a fantastic film that flew under the radar, check out The Assessment from last year, a gripping drama set in a not-so-far-away future that tracks a young couple desperately trying to prove they should be allowed to have a baby.
