When Flaunt magazine spoke with Elizabeth Olsen last month, the actress was in Italy filming Avengers: Age of Ultron, which several set photos captured as she portrayed Wanda Maximoff aka the Scarlet Witch. Despite being in town for the Marvel sequel, Olsen kept mum on plot details, but she did address the completely new experience. “Any time they give us a call sheet or any time there’s a new draft, they have to shred our old papers, recalled Elizabeth of the secrecy surrounding Age of Ultron. “I don’t think I’m allowed to say anything! And I’m too terrified. I really just feel like I’m doing something that’s top secret and somehow has a lot more importance than anything else I’ve been around, so that alone is hilarious. I want to take a photo and send to my friends, not that I want to tweet or Instagram it, just for personal reasons—and I feel like I’m going to get in trouble if I take a photo on set!”
Elizabeth Olsen also says that, even though both films have big budgets, action, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in common, the Avengers: Age of Ultron shoot is quite different from Godzilla. “The people at Legendary [Pictures] are really good at keeping things under wraps,” she says. “Avengers already has so much attention—all the Marvel films do—so filming something like Godzilla was basically a cast of actors who are all really well-respected, [but] they’re just under the radar. We didn’t have anything like [this for Godzilla], you’re just focused on making the movie. There wasn’t any other media part of it. It was an awesome first experience on one of these big movies because it’s been a really simple transition; there’s nothing too grandiose about it in my mind except for the fact that we had a very large crew and a lot of extras.” Further during interview, Olsen was asked if she would return to stage acting which invoked another comparison to her experience on Avengers: Age of Ultron. “It’s definitely different when I’m doing Avengers now,” she said. “It takes, like, eleven setups to do one-eighth of a page; you spend a whole day doing what might be a seven-second sequence.” When asked if she has a preference between film and theater, the actress admits, “I love them both. With one, you have the advantage of editing, which sometimes can be a disadvantage for actors, actually. There’s something about picking the frame and the speed of how you shoot it, that all those things will help you. And then on stage, you play everything that leads up to the moment—you have a momentum—whereas on set, you wait around for an hour and a half and they call you to do something epic. And you’re like, okay, wake up, you’ve been sitting for an hour and a half... It’s stimulating. It’s being alive. It’s breaking up the mundane.”
Elizabeth Olsen then went on to discuss her approach to playing a character while indicating that playing the Scarlet Witch as made herself confident physically. “I don’t approach things like ‘I am the character,’” she started. “I don’t think that would be healthy for me. I do think, doing things like The Avengers, I’ve noticed I’ve felt really confident recently. And I think it’s because I get to be very confident physically all day. I get to be a kind of grounded badass. And if that’s rubbing off on me, then that’s fun. But then when you’re playing someone who is weak, then you kind of walk around feeling weak without even realizing it. Anyone can bring that into their lives. It’s in our control to be positive or to be powerful or confident, even though people don’t think it is.” Check out Olsen’s full interview and photoshoot with Flaunt magazine.
