Yes, she's Mary-Kate and Ashley's little sister, but Elizabeth Olsen’s talent speaks for
itself.
You don't become one of the biggest stars of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” just
because your sisters were on “Full House.”
Going all the way back to the beginning, here’s the transformation of Elizabeth Olsen.
Anybody who was alive during the '90s knows about child stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
The twins were taking over our televisions at the time, but another familiar face was
just beginning to star alongside them as well.
In 1994, their younger sister, Elizabeth Olsen, got a taste of the entertainment bug when
she appeared in her sisters' series “The Adventures of Mary-Kate and Ashley: The Case
of Thorn Mansion.”
Yet, she didn't take it as seriously as her child star siblings.
Elizabeth told “SFGate,”
"To me, it was never acting.
It was silly and fun."
Elizabeth initially wasn't even supposed to be involved.
Each day, when her mother picked her and her brother up from school, they would head to
set to see her older sisters acting.
Mary-Kate and Ashley got Elizabeth started, and her miniature acting career ended up catapulting
from there.
She went on to appear in an episode of “Full House” and even their television movie “How
the West was Fun.”
Funnily enough, Elizabeth Olsen's childhood visits and performances on professional sets
aren't her most vivid memories.
She admitted on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,”
"The actual experience of doing it I don't remember so much."
She was only 5 years old, after all.
When Elizabeth Olsen turned 10 in 1999, acting seemed to have already taken quite a toll
on her.
At least, for the time being.
She had been auditioning on her own, but still felt the pressure of feeling like her siblings'
fame was helping her along.
She explained to “The Guardian,”
"I never got any job because of my sisters.
I could have pulled a few strings through them, but I never needed to."
Olsen didn't want any acting job just handed to her.
After sitting down with her parents, she decided there were a lot more negatives to being a
child star than positives, so show business officially took a backseat to her studies.
Olsen became involved heavily in ballet, no doubt influenced by her mother who practiced
it as well.
She even joined sports teams while making her way through high school.
She told “SFGate,”
"I grew up with a really creative group of kids, and we would always make our own movies
and plays anytime we had a project to do for class, it always turned into a musical somehow."
Even while she was busy living the life of an average teenager, Olsen still had big dreams.
She told “The Guardian” that she still knew she wanted to be an actor.
To set herself apart from her sisters, Elizabeth Olsen decided to enroll herself in acting
school.
She admitted to “The Guardian,”
"Their fame made me more determined to study."
When she turned 17, she moved to the opposite side of the country and enrolled in Tisch
School of the Arts at New York University.
There, she was bound and determined to prove that she had what it took to become an actor
- all on her own.
One way to do that was to start auditioning for roles on a stage instead of on a set.
The theater scene seemed the place to be.
She told “Nylon,”
"I just always thought that theater was different from being an actor in Hollywood for some
reason."
Throughout her six years studying at Tisch, Olsen booked multiple understudy roles on
and off Broadway, including a production of “Impressionism” in 2009.
Even though, as she admitted to “The New York Times,” she never, quote, “got to
go on.”
Instead, she spent a majority of her time typing up essays for school while sitting
backstage.
Though she didn't book any starring roles on the stage, she did eventually book herself
an agent, who steered her towards Hollywood.
Elizabeth Olsen got to a point where she was auditioning for absolutely everything she
could - even if it wasn't in theater.
She explained to Marie Claire,
"I was seizing every opportunity."
As a result, more and more smaller movies started calling her up.
It was then that a theme emerged: she began booking roles on psychological thriller after
psychological thriller.
The independent film world suddenly started opening doors, even though she had never specifically
courted this corner of the industry.
She explained,
"I didn't really have another option.
Those were the jobs I was getting."
In 2011, Olsen got herself a starring role in the indie film “Martha Marcy May Marlene,”
and her career practically catapulted overnight.
The movie was screened at Sundance, where it was quickly picked up by Fox Searchlight
Pictures.
Olsen became a big name, and casting directors started calling her up and keeping her busy
on the big screen.
The attention gave her even more of a chance to choose the movies she wanted to be involved
in, too.
Elizabeth Olsen's serious acting skills weren't the only thing she began showing off on-screen.
Many of her new movie roles were requiring her to sing, as well.
In 2013, she lent her voice to the movie “Very Good Girls,” before starring as an aspiring
singer in “I Saw the Light” in 2015.
While she isn't musically trained, Olsen rehearsed hard, just as she had for any other role.
She told “The Boot,”
"I'm not saying I sing great, but I do have vocal control.
I know what a flat is, I know what a sharp is, and I do know how to crack my voice.
Those techniques, you learn."
Olsen obviously wasn't so bad, either.
Two years later, she landed yet another singing role in the movie “Kodachrome.”
So, is singing something serious this actor would ever consider full-time?
Well, she cleared that up on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” saying,
"I would never call myself a singer.
I would never want to sing as myself, but I like singing."
By the time she was 24 years old, Elizabeth Olsen had made it clear that she was destined
to be a superstar, but little did she know that her future would include superhero tights.
It all started when Olsen became adamant about doing more than independent films.
She told “Popcorn” with Peter Travers,
"There was a part in [my] career where I was thinking, 'Why am I not being seen for bigger
films?'"
Her agent had no idea this is what she wanted, and set her up to meet with Marvel.
A meeting with Marvel led to a meeting with director Joss Whedon, who was instantly a
fan of Olsen.
In 2014, she made an appearance after the credits in “Captain America: The Winter
Soldier.”
It was a brief introduction for a character that became an integral part of the Avengers
franchise.
The world now knew her as the iconic comic book character Wanda Maximoff, also known
as the Scarlet Witch, and Olsen knew it was the perfect role for her.
Finding the character to be, quote, "fascinating," "deeply emotive," and "driven by a deep, dark
emotion," Olsen said that she decided,
"If I'm going to be part of one of these, this is the right thing to be a part of."
And with that, her career instantly changed.
Thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Olsen can now boast that she stars in the highest
grossing movie in history, “Avengers: Endgame.”
Prior to 2017, Elizabeth Olsen never had a social media account.
She shared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,”
"I don't like interacting with strangers.
It's a little invasive."
Yet, when she booked a role with Marvel, she thought it'd be the perfect place to promote
herself and her new projects.
Immediately upon joining the online platform, Olsen gained over a million followers, and
while most of us would be excited about that, she was extremely uncomfortable.
Her Instagram account - in combination with her massive movie roles - propelled Olsen
even faster into fame.
But the value of having a promotional machine to reach out to Marvel's intensely loyal fans
proved too valuable to abandon.
Still, Olsen desperately wanted to delete her social media accounts, and eventually,
she decided enough was enough.
She told “Who What Wear,”
"I care about privacy.
I don't have a desire for people to speak about me."
It hardly mattered; people were already seeing enough of her on the big screen.
In 2020, Olsen officially went off-line.
As Elizabeth Olsen was searching for her next big role in 2018, a script called “Sorry
for Your Loss” caught her eye.
She told “Entertainment Weekly,”
"I just thought this was a really beautiful and funny way of discussing something we all
have to deal with, which is how to move on from losing people we love the most."
Olsen knew she had to be involved, and the creator wanted her to be more than just an
actor in the television series, too.
Starting out in theater and then making it on the big screen, Olsen had never been a
part of TV before.
She'd also never produced, but she decided to hop behind-the-scenes and help get a studio
involved in airing this story.
That's when the team was approached by Facebook with a pitch to run the show on the platform's
streaming service, “Watch.”
Olsen admitted to “BUILD Series,”
"And that was a weird thing to me, because I didn't even know that they were streaming."
Seeing as she didn't have a social media account, this only made sense.
Even so, the platform seemed like the perfect place to air all the episodes.
It gave people the chance to not only watch the show, but be able to discuss their grief
in a safe space.
Producing ended up giving Olsen the creative control she didn't even know she craved.
She told “Entertainment Weekly,”
"It's just been the most fun job I've ever had."
By 2019, Elizabeth Olsen had fallen deeply in love with something other than acting.
Her boyfriend of two years, musician Robbie Arnett, had proposed to her.
While it was a private affair, the paparazzi had gotten a glimpse of her awe-inspiring
emerald diamond that Arnett offered her for their engagement.
Though Olsen has never announced her big news publicly, we have a hunch that the proposal
had something to do with her favorite foods.
Back in 2018, only a year after she was first spotted with Arnett, she told “Harper's
Bazaar” about what she would be doing on a day she described as perfect - and it sounds
pretty perfect to us as well!
She said,
"The night before I would have prepped bread, like dough, then the next day I'd bake bread
and create a delicious meal, sit outside in the sun, eat delicious food all day with people
I love."
We can only assume that Arnett would be enjoying it all alongside her.
Elizabeth Olsen must have made quite an impact on Marvel, not to mention the brand's fans,
because she got her very own spin-off series with the studio.
In 2021, the first episodes of “WandaVision” hit the streaming service of Marvel's parent
company, Disney, opening Olsen up to an even wider audience than before.
Olsen explained to “DuJour,”
"This show is quite literally setting my character up to be what comic book fans know her as,
the Scarlet Witch, and who we refer to her as, Wanda I just got chills; I'm such a dork."
It would seem the theater-kid-turned-indie-darling has cemented herself in the mainstream.
Instead of simply starring alongside the other Avengers, Olsen was now able to very nearly
stand alone.
It was the first time that Olsen was able to dig deeper into her character off of the
big screen.
She told “Entertainment Weekly,”
"I feel such a strong sense of ownership of Wanda.
And I'm so excited now that we've cracked open this other part of her, so that there
hopefully could be more stories to tell."
Considering the fact that, as of this video, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has generated
$22.56 billion at the worldwide box office, something tells us there will be no shortage
of stories for Olsen to tell in the future.
Even at the peak of an extremely successful career, Elizabeth Olsen has admitted that
she may leave acting behind one day.
It seems that going back to college may be a part of her plans.
She revealed in “Who What Wear's” Fall 2019 Issue,
"I'm interested in the new science of irrigation and water conservation in California."
The issue also listed off her non-Hollywood interests as, quote, "architecture, interior
design, or landscaping."
Olsen also expressed interest in a career that's, quote, "a lot more private," and that
she's not saddled with the desire to be a star forever.
She mentioned,
"I could be someone who's lived multiple lives, multiple careers.”
For a performer who loves being low key instead of always hanging out in the spotlight, Olsen
seems to be one in a million.
She admitted,
"I don't like standing out in a crowd."
So, it only makes sense that another profession could be her key to privacy.
After all, she's had loads of experience pretending to be other people on-screen.
She's sure to have the perfect experience to pull from when she opts for a more private
life.
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