Elizabeth Olsen Covers Glamour UK: ohnotheydidnt

trekkiepetrelli in ohnotheydidnt

Apr 21, 2021 16:12

Elizabeth has been living in Richmond since October, while filming Doctor Strange 2, alongside Benedict Cumberbatch. “It’s a bonkers movie, they’re definitely going for that horror show vibe”.

On Wanda / Elizabeth

The show has been heralded as the most feminist of all Marvel outputs to date and touches on a lot of pertinent issues, including mental health, and women’s power and empowerment. In person, Elizabeth in contrast to her on-screen character, seems grounded, open, down-to-earth and, dare I say it, remarkably ‘normal’. In fact, she tells me “‘Just be normal’ is one of my favourite things to say; ‘be normal and be kind.’”

On Mental Health

“I’m someone who wears my heart on my sleeve, but I desperately understand Wanda just wanting to keep things together and this obsessive control thing,” she tells me. “It was a lot of exploration. I am a very emotional person, so it felt fine, but the best part was finding the humour in the absurdity and darkness.”

“I had major panic attacks for a long time,” she confides. “It was totally debilitating. I was living in New York on my own and I was 22.” Explaining how back then, she didn’t understand anxiety and what she was going through, the 32-year-old relays how she learnt to deal with it. “I didn’t realise it was something that you could not control. And the issue is the control part. Then I just learnt a bunch of brain tricks from friends who actually went to a neuropsychiatrist - and instead of medicating, I decided to do it that way. With panic attacks, you have to put your attention off ‘whatever’s making you spin’ onto something else. It was [about] being present in the moment and identifying all the things around you in order to not spin."

Her Favourite WandaVision Moment

“One of my favourite moments is when we were filming the third episode, the ’70s episode. I’m very pregnant and I go through the entire pregnancy in 30 minutes. My waters were supposed to break and then water inside the house was supposed to pour down on Paul and I. We were told it was going to be hot water, and we could only do it one take… It was freezing cold! I don’t know what happened, but it was so funny. And I just felt like that the whole show - we had to work so quickly and get so much done in a day that all we could do is laugh our way through it.”

On Becoming an Actress

“I thought I was going to be on Wall Street,” she recalls laughing again. “I don’t know what I wanted, I was just good at math. And I’m good at sciences so [I thought] maybe I should do something like that. But at the end of the day, I really love acting.”

On Her Sisters Mary-Kate & Ashley

Elizabeth is notoriously private about her siblings, but she does recall one aspect of their fame that affected her at an early age. “I was 10 and I was curious about auditioning… and I realised very quickly it wasn’t for me because I was missing my sports teams, my dance class and all the extracurricular activities at school. But during that time, I thought ‘I don’t want to be associated with [Mary-Kate and Ashley]’, for some reason. I guess I understood what nepotism was like inherently as a 10-year-old. I don’t know if I knew the word, but there is some sort of association of not earning something that I think bothered me at a very young age. It had to do with my own insecurities, but I was 10. So I don’t know how much I processed, but I did think, ‘I’m going to be Elizabeth Chase [her middle name] when I become an actress.’”