The two actors who shaped Elizabeth Olsen’s career: “It was very important to have seen that”
Some actors build up a truly impressive body of work almost in the background without anyone shouting about it, and that seems to be the case with Elizabeth Olsen.
Over the last 15 years, she has steadily become one of the best in the business, hopping from one genre to the next and generally stealing whatever she’s in, whether it’s a big-budget Marvel flick or an emotionally fraught indie.
Since she broke through in the thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene in 2011 and won a raft of awards and nominations for playing a young woman desperately trying to flee an abusive cult, she has consistently taken on interesting and challenging roles alongside paying the bills thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, spinning off her character in several Avengers movies into the acclaimed WandaVision TV show on Disney Plus.
It’s arguably in the last ten years or so that she’s done her most impressive work, though. There was 2017’s Tyler Sheridan-penned thriller Wind River, alongside Jeremy Renner, 2023’s HBO series Love and Death, in which she played a 1970s Texan housewife who has an affair with a fellow churchgoer, leading to a killing, and then there was the fantastic, Black Mirror-esque The Assessment in 2024.
Nowhere near enough people are aware of that movie, a dystopian drama in which a young couple have to prove they are worthy of having a baby in a world where doing so is strictly rationed, having to deal with Alicia Vikander’s unhinged assessor living with them for seven chaotic days. Olsen is jaw-droppingly good in the film, experiencing almost every emotion a woman and mother can, rounding off the movie in a literal fire of emotion.
She no doubt drew on the influences of her acting role models for the performance, including Diane Keaton, who sadly passed away earlier this year. Speaking to Backstage about the actors who inspired her, she said, “I guess there are two influential movies that I saw growing up. One was Gone with the Wind. I’ve seen it so many freaking times. I love it. Vivien Leigh’s performance is just so – she’s everything a woman is. She’s flirty, vulnerable, angry, shy, manipulative. But then she’s strong and definitive, then apologetic.”
Then she referenced Keaton, with Olsen adding, “Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Yes, a Woody Allen movie, which is also, like, not the greatest name, but it’s about Diane Keaton. It’s not like it’s a performance everyone needs to see, but it was really important for me to have seen it as a child, because I felt like it was a version of a woman that I was.”
Continuing, “Because I was seeing a lot of hot women, or mom women, or distressed women. And then there was this woman who was confident and would debate with him (Allen), but then she would also be neurotic, and she’d be uncomfortable in her skin, but then she’d also be sexy and curious and flawed but hilarious.”
Although Olsen won’t reunite with her Marvel buddies in the upcoming Avengers movies, she does have several new projects on the way, including the steamy LA vampire thriller Flesh of the Gods with Kristen Stewart and Oscar Isaac, and a movie about a hunt for a cyberterrorist called Panic Carefully, alongside Julia Roberts and Eddie Redmayne.
