Elizabeth Olsen Hates — Sorry — Loves Doing Press For Marvel
She's having the time of her life
After spending the first years of her career starring in acclaimed indie joints like Martha Marcy May Marlene and Ingrid Goes West, Elizabeth Olsen is now best known as a Marvel megastar. Her character Wanda Maximoff, a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch, has risen to prominence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe through Disney+’s WandaVision and now the latest Marvel hit, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. This is something she truly cannot believe and also absolutely loves, just ask her.
While doing press for Doctor Strange, which is playing at every single cinema in my area on the hour every hour, she cannot hide her excitement and incredulity at her position, so much so that she can barely talk about it. In an interview with The Independent, she barely speaks about the film or the process of working with director Sam Raimi:
“I’m trying to ignore it and not talk about it, but that’s what’s going on,” she says with an amiable grin. “I actually do this thing where I get very comfortable with it not taking up a lot of space in my mind, because it’s safer and I don’t feel as vulnerable.”
And while she says this avoidance to talk about the movie she is co-starring in and currently promoting stems more from pressure than the film’s quality itself, Olsen cannot speak to the latter because as of that interview she has still not seen it. I understand, sometimes you love your work so much you cannot really talk about it, or think about it, even if it’s what you are paid to do.
In a previous stop of Olsen’s reluctant press tour, she told Jimmy Fallon that she could not believe she was nominated for an Emmy for her role as Wanda, saying “No one does a Marvel job and thinks that you’re gonna get nominated for something.” She then explained why she can no longer watch these Marvel films at their premieres: “Every time I watch it I just look around me and I just think, ‘It’s our first flop.’” Poor girl.
