Elizabeth Olsen Gives Interview About Direction and Discipline In Acting

Marvel star Elizabeth Olsen discusses with IndieWire her recent direction in her acting career and finding her niche in complex, obsessive women. While mostly shying away from the spotlight, Olsen treats her profession with incredible discipline and eagerness.

While she is still well-known for her work as Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Olsen expresses her relief that she is free to speak her mind about her current work as Candy Montgomery in the upcoming miniseries Love & Death. “It’s really annoying doing press and not being able to say anything,” she unloads. “And then I end up doing retroactive press from Marvel projects because people want to talk about the thing I couldn’t talk about.” She loves talking about new projects and the effort put into them, but the performative nature of press work and interviews often puts her off.

Olsen is still willing to put a lot of work into her performances, even if they can be a gamble to participate in. For instance, when working on the set of WandaVision, she felt she “was in a bubble” working on a character that had been slowly introduced instead of gaining instant fame. Despite this fear, Olsen was soon delighted to find “a video of a drag brunch [with Wanda drag],” signifying that she had made it.

When she was younger, Olsen never chased after a severe acting career, as she felt like her sisters, Mary-Kate and Ashley, were too isolated from the outside world while pursuing their acting careers. Even now, she doesn’t have a lot of projects since she doesn’t “like the amount of attention that [she has] now, but to have it all happen at once without anything to compare it to sounds challenging.” Still, thanks to her parents’ incredible discipline in their work in real estate and dancing, she applies an astonishing amount of effort into her roles. When moving from Maximoff to Montgomery, she describes it as knowing “how to move [my] body through space in a different way,” no longer daunted by the task of performing on a television series. 

Despite this, she doesn’t like pushing herself to become one of the best actresses in Hollywood. When asked where she sees herself in five years, she jokingly says, “Probably sitting on a sofa, talking to a journalist.”