Elizabeth Olsen is best known for playing the powerful Scarlet Witch in the mega-popular
Marvel Cinematic Universe. But there were a lot of things in her life that came before
her debut in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Here's the stunning transformation of Elizabeth Olsen.
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen starred in the sitcom Full House beginning in 1987. This
was long before Elizabeth Olsen was born, but the show and her sisters' subsequent popularity
would be a big influence on her childhood. To Elizabeth though, it was a simple life.
As she grew up, she visited the sets of her sisters' on-screen projects very frequently
with her brother. She told SFGate:
"When my brother and I would get picked up from school, that was our after-school care.
It was really hanging around on set, so every once in a while, they'd ask us, 'So, do you
guys want to be in this one? We'll put gum in your hair.' To me, it was never acting.
... It was silly and fun."
While it might still be a fond memory, Olsen has expressed the desire to distance herself
from the show and its sequel Fuller House.
Somewhere along the way, Elizabeth Olsen's interest in acting was piqued. Olsen played
a few small parts in projects starring her sisters. She laughed off those exciting beginnings
in a conversation with The Guardian:
"Oh, I really got to exercise the acting muscles there — you can't imagine the awesome thespian
demands on the kid playing Girl In Car in How The West Was Fun!"
After that, Olsen briefly tried to get into other projects, most notably Spy Kids. She
ended up not getting the part, but it definitely taught her how serious acting could be. She
told Today:
"[The script] looked bigger than the Bible to me. I didn't understand why I would ever
read something that big."
The Olsen twins are well-known for being reclusive and hesitant to face the press, and it appears
that's a family trait. Elizabeth Olsen shared with The Telegraph:
"I understand that it's not that normal to be worried about being photographed, when
you're growing up, by strange men around Los Angeles who are chasing you in cars. [...] It
made me despise those kinds of people, it made me despise gossip magazines."
In that same interview, she revealed that she likes traveling incognito, and does not
want to reward, quote, "stalkery" behavior. Luckily, she's found a way to get around being
recognized, saying,
"When I was at the airport yesterday, one guy came up to me and said, 'Has anyone ever
told you, you're the spitting image of Elizabeth Olsen?' And I said, 'Oh yeah, I've heard that
before,' and that was it."
Hiding in plain sight. Works every time!
Many might assume that the Olsens' mom and dad, Jarnette and David, were stage parents,
but that wasn't the case at all. Elizabeth told The Guardian,
"My mother's a ballet dancer — which isn't what you call a job — and the mother of
four children, and my father works full-time in real estate. My parents had very little
to do with my sisters' job really, at least not after getting them that first job."
"Happy Mother's Day. It's the one day we get to say 'Thanks for having us, Mom!'"
David and Jarnette divorced in February 1996. Elizabeth was just 6 years old at the time.
David married his coworker a month later. Some thought the split had fractured the family,
as Ashley reportedly did not attend the wedding, but, despite this, Elizabeth is reportedly
close with both her parents, even having her father visit on set sometimes.
Though Elizabeth Olsen didn't turn out to be a breakout child star like her sisters,
it turns out that she just preferred being a kid. She had to make a decision when an
angry ballet teacher threatened to drop her for missing so many classes after she'd been
going on auditions. She recounted to SFGate,
"I realized at that point, 'I really love ballet. I really love sports. I really love
doing my camps. I really love taking my singing lessons and doing all these things and being
a student.'"
Her parents had her sit down and write a pros and cons list, and the cons won out. However,
she would still develop her passion for acting, though in a more quiet way than her older
sisters. However, in a few years, Elizabeth Olsen would start taking acting much more
seriously.
Another adult figure in Elizabeth Olsen's life would influence her to move back into
the world of acting. A drama teacher at her Los Angeles high school helped her find the
academic side of the craft.
Olsen went on to study at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and, as a sophomore,
she was accepted into the Atlantic Theater Company's conservatory program. She worked
on student projects and auditioned for some professional shows. She was eventually cast
in the off-Broadway production Dust and the Broadway show Impressionism. From there, she
was able to land an agent, and it looked like her career was taking off.
However, in 2004, her sister Mary-Kate Olsen entered treatment for an eating disorder.
The next several years saw the paparazzi harassing the young woman. Things only got worse when
the twins went to New York for school, where they had to drop out early. The twins then
began to attempt to dodge the never-ending mob of photographers.
At this point, Elizabeth found the attention abusive, saying to Nylon,
"They would follow us shopping and [Mary-Kate and Ashley] would almost get into car accidents
because of the paparazzi. And I didn't want to be a part of it. I just thought, 'This
is such bulls---.'"
No doubt this difficult period just reaffirmed the Olsens' distrust of the media and informed
a lot of Elizabeth's caginess when it comes to being photographed.
As a part of her college education, Elizabeth Olsen got to spend some time on a completely
different continent. As a junior, she flew all the way to Russia to study for a semester
at the Moscow Art Theatre School. She told Nylon,
"My teacher was teaching me the whole Stanislavsky training, and I love Chekov, so I really wanted
to go."
The semester proved very formative for Olsen and her art. She shared with The Village Voice,
"[It was] really physical. I don't think there's better theater in the world than in Russia.
[...] The semester I studied at the Moscow Art Theatre was much more about using your
imagination. I thought a lot about theater in my life when I was there."
The 2011 Sundance Festival was Elizabeth Olsen's time to shine. She starred in two movies that
year, Martha Marcy May Marlene and Silent House, earning notice for her A-tier acting
chops. Oh, and she was still taking classes at NYU at the time, in case that wasn't enough.
"I filmed one movie before these two, but then that's it. 2 out of 3. Making it at Sundance!"
Critics were surprised by this seemingly sudden arrival, but this had been a long time coming.
Olsen told Nylon,
"When all the Sundance reviews were coming out and they were like, 'It Girl of the festival!'
'Came out of nowhere!' 'And she's an Olsen sister!' my dad would be like, 'Don't they
know you've been doing this your whole life?! These people should be writing that you have
been working on this forever!'"
At least they were finally paying attention — better late than never! It was time for
the world to know the real Elizabeth Olsen.
After the festival, Elizabeth Olsen didn't really buy that she had hit the jackpot, saying
to Nylon,
"It's not like everything has changed. It's still a struggle, just a different kind of
struggle."
Films like Liberal Arts and Red Lights continued to let her shine, and made her a star in the
indie film market. Now Olsen sees that this part of her career really was a great step
forward. She shared with Vanity Fair,
"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. [...] 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.
[...] in hindsight, I could've made smarter choices that could've led to a different place."
Elizabeth Olsen's big splash, of course, came with her cameo at the end of Captain America:
Winter Soldier. Playing Scarlet Witch within the Marvel Cinematic Universe introduced Olsen
to the general public. She would continue the role in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain
America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame.
Being the true thespian she is, Olsen was drawn to the character's emotional struggle.
She explained to Harper's Bazaar in 2018:
"There was so much emotional depth to her and then there's the fact that she is her
own villain because of her inability to understand what her powers are and how to control them."
"It's just unbelievable the amount of material she has to draw from."
Of course, this newfound fame gave Olsen a ton of new attention, which disrupted her
private lifestyle.
"Every day I think I should delete [my Instagram]. I'm trying to treat that aspect of my life
as part of the job. [...] It's a distraction more than anything."
Still, she appreciates her fans and lovingly calls the MCU community "magical."
Elizabeth Olsen met actor Boyd Holbrook on the set of Very Good Girls in 2012, where
they quickly hit it off. Olsen and Holbrook moved in together in 2014, and a few months
later were engaged. This was not long after her sister Mary-Kate announced her engagement
to Olivier Sarkozy.
Regarding her engagement, Olsen told Marie Claire in a 2014 interview:
"I'm relaxed about it, but I am excited and planning ideas because it's fun.. It's just
like throwing a party to celebrate life."
Unfortunately, it was not meant to be, and the two split in January 2015, with Olsen
allegedly being the one to drop the axe.
Elizabeth Olsen's down-to-earth lifestyle has apparently made her realize the importance
of her position in the public eye. Her casting as the Scarlet Witch, a character with a Jewish
and Roma ethnic identity, led to some concerns of white-washing. Olsen was surprised by the
critiques, but understood where they were coming from. She said to The Telegraph,
"I know I'm a white blonde American woman, and I know what that looks like to other people.
I think it's very important not to fool yourself. You can be who you are and still be able to
relate to different kinds of people in the world."
After doing Wind River, a film about sexual violence on a reservation, Olsen was moved
to volunteer weekly at the UCLA Medical Center, working with a program that supports victims
of sexual assault. However, as with many of things she does in her personal life, she
kept it on the down low. She told Vanity Fair,
"I don't need to tell people what charity I do. I think it's funny when people are like,
'this is my charity.' It's also not something to brag about. It's a really devastating thing
in the world."
Soon after the announcement for the streaming service Disney+, Marvel Studios head Kevin
Feige revealed that an Avengers spin-off series featuring Scarlet Witch and the character's
superhero love interest Vision was slated to premiere on the platform. Elizabeth Olsen
divulged to Variety that the show, titled WandaVision, will be set in the 1950s, and
that she and her co-star Paul Bettany are excited about the opportunity.
Olsen and Bettany have worked together quite a bit in the Avengers films, and it seems
like they get along very well. And they're even able to throw some playful shade at one
another. For example, Bettany quipped in a BUILD interview,
"It was very difficult working with Lizzy. I felt I carried her the whole way through."
He meant that literally, of course.
While Elizabeth Olsen had been engaged briefly in the past, by 2019, she was ready to give
forever-love another shot. That's the year she accepted a ring from Milo Greene frontman
Robbie Arnett.
Olsen and Arnett had been dating for several years when they made the engagement official,
first appearing in public together back in March 2017. The couple made their red carpet
debut later that year at the Gersh pre-Emmys party, and they have been together ever since.
As for whether or not Olsen and Arnett will start a family, it's unclear, though Olsen
has said she could imagine children in her home. She told Modern Living,
"I was also thinking, 'There's this small room upstairs, which would be good for a kid.
I don't know where things will lead, but I do think about it in that way: 'I think I
could raise kids here.'"
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more List videos about your favorite
stars are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss
a single one.