MCU star Elizabeth Olsen credits her childhood love of the Star Wars franchise helping her on a path to her most famous role.
If you were to look at the early acting credits of Elizabeth Olsen, you’ll find movies like Martha Marcy May Marlene, Very Good Girls, Kill Your Darlings, and Liberal Arts. These are the kind of movies that you usually find playing at prestigious film festivals. In fact, three of the movies mentioned above were screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we saw Olsen being cast in one of the biggest franchises on the planet when she took on the role of Scarlet Witch in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. How did something like this happen? The answer: Star Wars.
In a recent interview with Collider, Olsen explained how Star Wars had an influence on her acting career. Olsen told Collider:
"It was actually a funny decision I had put out in the world. I talked to my agent, my manager who are like my other mothers. I just love them so much. And I told them, ‘I want to be considered for the projects that I grew up …’ – like, as a kid, looking at Star Wars and I was obsessed with Star Wars. You couldn’t peel me away from Star Wars as a child.And so I was trying to figure out, how do I start putting that out there because I feel like all I’m getting are these really disturbed women in independent films. [Now] it’s just a disturbed woman in a big franchise! They said take meetings with the people who run these companies and so I literally did. I met with Kevin [Feige] and a couple other people that were working there at the time. And then I met with the people who were running Legendary at the time. And there were a few others in different places."
The love of Star Wars at a young age is something that’s easy to identify with, and it’s easy to see how it could impact Olsen’s career in the way that it has. Olsen’s self-described obsession with the Star Wars franchise caused her to look for roles in major blockbuster films, the kinds that would create the level of excitement she felt watching Star Wars as a child. And it looks like following that path paid off.
Olsen ended up becoming a major part of the MCU, the only movie franchise in history that has even come close to being on the same level as Star Wars in terms of impact. Olsen has played Scarlet Witch in five MCU movies so far and is currently playing the character in WandaVision on Disney+. And it looks like Olsen is perfectly happy as part of a major franchise as she’s set to reprise the role at least one more time so far.
Who knows? If Olsen continues to look for projects that are inspired by her childhood love of Star Wars, maybe we’ll see her up on the big screen with a lightsaber someday.