Like a lot of actors on Marvel’s payroll, Elizabeth Olsen is a serious thespian. When they scooped her up to play Scarlet Witch, she was an indie darling best known for her brilliant work in the drama Martha Marcy May Marlene. For the last year she’s been open about how doing comic book movies cost her some challenging roles, which she’s starting to do more now again. (See: Max’s Love and Death.) In fact, if she never plays Wanda Maximoff again? Well, she’s fine with that.
Olsen sat down with White Lotus Season 2 breakout Meghann Fahy for one of Variety’s “Actors on Actors” chats (as caught by Entertainment Weekly). It’s been a while since Olsen played Wanda — in last year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, to be precise. Fahy asked Olsen if she missed her? Olsen was blunt.
“No, I don’t,” she replied. “I think it’s been almost 10 years of playing her. And I’ve loved it. And I think the reason why I am not calling Kevin Feige every day with ideas is because I’m really proud of what we were able to do. I think WandaVision was a really surprising opportunity.”
That said… “If someone were to tell me that I’m fired from Marvel movies, I will feel proud of what we made,” Olsen continued. “And I really am just trying to figure out how to load up other films and characters so it becomes less about the Marvel of it all.”
Olsen has received some of the best notices for any actor in the MCU, particularly when she showed both the breadth and the depth of her talents on the shape-shifting WandaVision, in which she had to embody acting types stretching decades while her character wrestled messily with grief. Now she gets to do that kind of thing without playing a character who flies and creatively massacres other superheroes.