Elizabeth Olsen Is “Very Aware” Of The Nepotism Which Helped Her Get Acting Gigs
In case you couldn’t tell by Elizabeth Olsen’s last name or the fact that she looks like the Olsens, she’s the younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. And coincidentally she’s got a movie star career including starring as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch in anything Marvel. She’s currently the star of the Disney+ series, WandaVision, alongside Paul Bettany and she’s here to say that she knows her last name helped her to get where she’s at today. Well, at least she didn’t say, “Listen when I was starting out, I auditioned under a fake name and the fake name was Elizabeth NotRelatedToTheOlsensOkay!”
Elizabeth is on the digital cover for Grazia USA‘s New York Fashion Week Issue, and she’s making the face I made over Grazia USA choosing this picture as a cover:
Elizabeth also talked to Grazia about her acting career and working on WandaVision. The series spoofs different decades of television sitcoms while telling the story of Wanda’s post-Avengers: Endgame narrative. She said of working on the show, via People:
“I was a very hammy, performative child. So, I do think I got to live out some sort of childhood dream doing the show… The highlight was really getting to tell a story about these superhero individuals told in different decades of American sitcoms, trying to match the tone of those sitcoms in order to help orate the story. But keep it playful and fun.”
She admitted that having the last name Olsen (and also the same got-damn face! The Olsen genes are on something) helped her get the career most people only dream of:
“Nepotism is a thing and I’m very aware of it. And of course, I’ve always wanted to do it alone.”
Elizabeth seemed destined for acting, though, on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show last month, Elizabeth talked about forcing her family to go to her theatre productions every summer.
“My sisters didn’t love being on like live theater. They didn’t love live audiences. They were pretty shy and it made them nervous… I was the one that was like made everyone come to see me perform a musical that we made within two weeks and they had to see three of them every summer. They have to go to every dance performance… it was always unique to me that I loved theater and dancing and singing.”
The Olsen twins didn’t like to sing and dance? News to me!
Elizabeth looked up to her older sisters though, and when all the world was going insane and copying their style to look like a homeless 90-year-old Italian woman on her way to a funeral, Elizabeth was doing the same:
“Everything my sisters have ever worn in my entire life I have wanted to wear still as an adult today. I want their coats. I want their shoes. I want their dresses. And that is something that I never grew out of… And so during that time, I myself was just going through every secondhand store and wearing all of, all of the things, except mine became more like Annie Hall-y.”
Well hey, maybe Elizabeth did get her career through nepotism, but only sort of. The Olsen Twins’ main gig is scowling at fashion events and selling people overpriced shit. So technically if Elizabeth isn’t robbing people blind by selling them a backpack with some pills sewn onto it, she isn’t really following in their footsteps.
Pic: Wenn.com