Elizabeth Olsen is a singular movie star. Breaking through in Sean Durkin’s eerie Martha Marcy May Marlene, 14 years ago, she went on to confirm mainstream status in the Godzilla remake of 2014 and, as the slinky Scarlet Witch, in various bits of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But she has always remained an independent presence. That is to do with the films she makes. It is also to do with her attitude. She spent a semester at Moscow Art Theatre School. She has done Romeo and Juliet off Broadway. And she shuns social media. Do the PR wonks not encourage her to Insta her latest release?
“Obviously there are opportunities for being a salesperson – if I wanted to do that stuff,” she says. “But I’m a shit salesperson unless I really love something.”
I have not, to my knowledge, seen Olsen try to sell something she doesn’t love. When she’s on board with a production she couldn’t be less excremental. She’s jolly, unpretentious and clever. And she talks like a real person.
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We are here because of her role in Eternity, a delightful romantic comedy from the Irish film-maker David Freyne. There’s a lot of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death in this tale of a young woman who, delayed in the afterlife’s holding area, must choose between eternity with her first husband or her second one. (Callum Turner is the one who died young. Miles Teller is the chap she then settled for.)
“Definitely,” Olsen says. “Powell and Pressburger are in there. And also we were very conscious of Billy Wilder.”
Freyne, a versatile director, has proved himself in Ireland with the horror flick The Cured and the romantic comedy Dating Amber. Ruairí O’Brien, who has worked on Line of Duty and The Fall, is the director of photography. Heck, Olsen is in with the Irish cinematic mafia.
“I’ve always wanted to be involved with an Irish mafia,” she says lightheartedly, echoing my facetious terminology.
“I had watched Dating Amber, and I was so moved by the sincerity and the humour. It didn’t feel like you were sacrificing one for the other. I also thought it was edited together really beautifully, and the colouring was really beautiful. I was really curious what he would do with a bigger opportunity of a story.”
She is probably aware that Patrick Freyne, the director’s brother, is an Irish Times journalist.
“Yes, I knew that,” she says. “There is a scene when I’m in the Ski Mountain Land with Cal. I can’t remember if it ended up in the film or not, but we plugged his brother’s book. We used it as a prop.”
Well received following its premiere at Toronto International Film Festival, Eternity is the sort of intelligent romantic comedy they don’t make so much any more.
“Yeah, I’ve been wanting to do something comedic,” Olsen says. “But when I read things that are comedy they are often quite broad and don’t have enough depth or complexity.”
Any consideration of Olsen’s career inevitably touches on her once unavoidable older sisters. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were the biggest child stars of the 1990s. Elizabeth, when a tiny kid, did make the odd appearance in the twins’ TV movies, but she didn’t properly commit to acting until deep into high school. Did the pressure put on her sisters cause her to think twice about life in the limelight?
“It’s a scary thing to put yourself in a field as a public entertainer,” she says. “It was just something I did my whole life. My earliest memories were dancing, doing musical theatre, singing lessons, making things with my friends.”
Many future actors do that, but few have a pair of pocket superstars in the family home.
“It’s good to have those obstacles growing up where you see maybe one idea of what a career is. You see it up close in person. And then you have to build what is important to you in a different way that becomes more substantial to who you are.”
She does have credits on Olsen twins joints such as the 1994 film How the West Was Fun, but my calculator tells me she can only have been five years old.
“Yeah, that was just after-school daycare,” she says. “Because there are four kids growing up.”
When I first met Olsen, back in 2012, she was still juggling classes at New York University with promotional duties for Martha Marcy May Marlene. The film has been a huge hit at Sundance, but she remained committed to finishing college. That impressed me.
“Oh God, yeah. When I was going to such an expensive school, it would have been really foolish not to,” she says. “At that point I could start paying for my own education and not rely on parents. So it felt nice to get to do that and to participate in that way. Education is very important to me. I’ve been very grateful for that being something that was such a huge part of my life.”
And she spent time that time studying in Moscow.
“It was incredible getting to live in a different country with a totally different culture, especially at a time when the international conflicts were pretty muted,” she says.
Olsen gives out a relaxed, devil-may-care attitude. But she clearly does take the art seriously. She is an executive producer of Eternity. She has worked hard to get Love Child, the upcoming film from Todd Solondz, legendary director of Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse, before the cameras.
“I’m not a producer on it, but I’ve never hustled more for a movie that’s having a hard time getting made,” she said of that project last year.
Yet Olsen is also a MCU star. She was first credited as Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch, in Avengers: Age of Ultron, in 2015, and repeated the role in several follow-ups, before deconstructing it in the postmodern TV series Wandavision. That franchise eats up time. Did she have any reservations about signing on?
“I was so excited,” she says. “I had loved Iron Man and Iron Man 2. I thought the first Avengers was great and was so new. Looking back 10 years later, it’s something we’ve normalised as part of culture, but it was something new.
“We had fantasy genres. We had Lord of the Rings. I grew up with Indiana Jones. There was that. But this was a really intelligent and entertaining and funny genre that Marvel figured out itself.”
Of course she didn’t then know how long she’d be associated with the project.
“I also only signed up for one movie,” she says. “I think there are reservations. Maybe they come if people ask you for six films or something.”
I have scoured the enormous cast list for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday and do not see her name on it. Is the door open for her to return in the future?
“I don’t know. I’m open to it. I think you need time away in order to figure it out. I think I’ve been so lucky in that I’ve done so much with one character.”
But being in the MCU gives a little piece of an actor to the wider world. Suddenly, Elizabeth Olsen, classy enabler of independent films, was on mile-high billboards in Tokyo, New York and Barcelona. Was it hard to retain privacy?
“Not to keep my private life to myself,” she says. “I am more recognised, I guess. But I’m someone who just travels the world bright-eyed and bushy tailed. I don’t really live my life thinking about all that.”
I can believe that. In a recent interview with National Public Radio, in the United States, she argued that she felt more like a boomer than a millennial. She connects with analogue technologies and less busy cultural content.
“It’s nostalgia for a time that seemed a bit simpler, yeah,” she says. “And by simpler, I mean, that’s comparative. I find the distractions of all the different ways we communicate sad and exhausting. I feel like they’re really playing a number on our emotional intelligence.”
Eternity is in cinemas from Friday, December 5th
