She’s an Avengers regular and grew up with some very famous siblings, but Olsen has managed to carve out a steady, laid-back niche for herself in Hollywood. After some career choices she now wishes she maybe had played slightly differently, Olsen is back with two very different films and enjoying “nothing being too precious.”
“Every time I wear these jeans I forget to ask for a black napkin,” Elizabeth Olsen laments, realizing white fuzz remnants have attached themselves to her black jeans. The actress drove herself to our lunch at a trendy Los Angeles eatery. She’s wearing a very low-key black long-sleeved shirt with the very low-key black pants, and she isn’t wearing any makeup. No one in the crowded patio area, a few days before the Fourth of July, seems to notice her, even though we are seated facing inward, our faces on full display for fellow lunch diners.
Olsen is an actress in one of the most successful film franchises of the decade and she bears a noticeable resemblance to her very high-profile, extremely successful fashion-designer older sisters: so it’s perhaps a bit surprising just how much she flies under the radar.
“[Sometimes] people are like, ‘Have we met before? You look familiar. You’re an actress? What have you been in?’” Olsen explains. “And then you have to start listing your credits, and you’re like, ‘Maybe the Avenger movies?’ ‘No, I’ve never seen a superhero movie.’ [Avengers] is what I always go to . . . I don’t look really like that person in the movie.”
She is inquisitive in a way that actors are not always. She looks up at me after digging in to our burratta appetizer, which I haven’t touched: “This is so good! Are you lactose intolerant?!” When I explain during a digression about live music that I’m always worried I’m blocking people’s views at concerts, she interjects, “By the way, I bet you are!”
The night before, Olsen threw a low-key (everything is so low-key!!) surprise party for her hairstylist and long-time best friend, Clay, at her place near Laurel Canyon. “I got a group together and cooked, and we all ate outside and stayed outside the whole time on the patio and the deck.” This might be hard to believe (though it probably won’t be), but she tells me that before a photo shoot the day before she was walking down a trail by her house and “just picked these weird brush from the ground.” She explains, “I made a little flower arrangement. Just starting your day [like that] is so nice.” During a discussion about film release dates, she takes stock of her chipped nail polish, which had been applied for the photo shoot the day before. “I don’t know why they ever do my nails. This is fresh nail polish, chipped and bent. I need to just take it off. I never wear it, and I wash my dishes too much to have nail polish on.”
This seems like the dream, doesn’t it? To be a very successful actress and yet to still be able to eat out relatively unnoticed and pick weird brush from the ground when you feel like it and to not at all have the vibe of “that person in the movie.”
It is likely for some of these very reasons that Olsen was the first choice for the team behind Ingrid Goes West, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and hits theaters on August 11, to play the integral character of Taylor. The sizzling, clever film stars Aubrey Plaza as the slightly unhinged Ingrid, who moves across the country after a breakdown, obsessed with a woman she comes across on Instagram. Taylor’s life seems impossibly whimsical and gorgeous and idyllic. “Taylor, for me, was everything,” Plaza, who also served as a producer on the film, tells me on the phone. “That part needed to be someone that was truly obsession-worthy. We had a very tiny, short dream list of women that we wanted for that part, and Elizabeth was at the very top of that list.“
As it turns out, Olsen also has another high-profile film out this month, as she stars in the dark, intense Wind River, opposite her Avengers co-star Jeremy Renner. (She filmed Wind River before she shot Ingrid Goes West last summer.)
Though it could be argued she was extremely well-positioned for a career in the arts, Olsen is very deliberate in pointing out that she put in the work to achieve acting success. She didn’t get into first-choice Brown University, so she attended New York University. She auditioned for roles throughout college (also completing a semester abroad in Russia, where she studied theater). “The first job I didn’t get that I really wanted” was Shakespeare in the Park, she says; but because she did not book it (after going through four rounds of auditions), she was able to take a part in the indie film Martha Marcy May Marlene in 2011. That role—as a woman who escapes from a cult—earned Olsen many film critics awards, and it set her career in motion.
That the film launched her on the trajectory it did came as something of a surprise to Olsen herself. “I didn’t understand independent film. I didn’t follow it. I just assumed independent movies were . . . when I was at Blockbuster and saw a movie that I was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know Maggie Gyllenhaal did this movie, I’m going to pick it up,’ that’s how I watched them.” She says that everyone told her at Sundance after the film’s premiere that her life was going to change, but she didn’t believe it. “I was like, ‘Doubt it, but cool. You guys are all living in a bubble.’ I thought everyone was living in a snow globe, and it was a weird thing where everyone thought it was so important what was going on [at Sundance] and I was like, ‘They’re movies.’”
But as it ended up playing out, it was the sort of moment an actress dreams and dreams and dreams will come to fruition. You’ve been on the audition grind in New York for years, and now you’ve got your breakout indie-film role and you’re at awards shows and on red carpets and appearing on magazine covers. You open your front door to find towers of scripts piled on top of each other.
When Olsen talks about those first few post-Martha years, though, it is clear that she perhaps wishes she had made some different choices (her subsequent films included the Josh Radnor indie Liberal Arts, the poorly reviewed Very Good Girls opposite Dakota Fanning; and a Godzilla remake). “I think the thing that I wished was that I had maybe, I mean I don’t wish anything was different . . . But what I would have told myself then was to be patient in choosing the next jobs and to believe the noise a bit and to know that this is a hard place to get to. It just kind of happened quickly. I had to learn how to make work choices; I had to learn how to pick jobs differently. I went through a few years of kind of just doing things because I was so lucky and happy to be offered opportunities. I just was so happy that people wanted to hire me and so I just kind of did things that, in hindsight, I could’ve made smarter choices that could’ve led to a different place.” She continues, “I learned in time and that’s good, [I] eventually figured it out, but there were certain opportunities that I think I could have waited around for, to work with certain directors and be a little bit more niche.” She snaps back to the present, and to the two films we’re discussing: “But I love where I am now and I love these projects that are coming out, and I feel like I’m starting to get into what I really want to be. . . . I’m right now having so much fun with nothing being too precious and having the ability to make smart decisions.”
