Elizabeth Olsen: 'I think I'm supposed to live in England'

Elizabeth Olsen is American showbiz royalty. The younger sister of Nineties tween screen icons turned adult fashion darlings Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, she’s had an admirable career in coolly credible film and TV since 2011 while also playing Wanda Maximoff – aka the Scarlet Witch – in various offshoots of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for 10 years.

This month, the 35-year-old stars alongside Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne in Netflix’s His Three Daughters, about sisters bickering and bonding in the rent-controlled New York apartment where their father is dying. Her promotional schedule is so hectic we miss each other in London, so she zooms me from New York.

A shame, as she tells me London is her spiritual and artistic home. She discovered this while shooting Wandavision here in 2020, the screwball but poignant Avengers TV spinoff featuring the Scarlet Witch and Paul Bettany’s android Vision, where a parody of historic small-screen genres masked a startling exploration of grief. Olsen and her husband Robbie Arnett, of rock band Milo Greene – who she met in 2017 and eloped with pre-pandemic – found themselves living in Richmond under Covid conditions.

“I think I'm supposed to live in England,” she smiles beatifically, hair scraped back and bushbaby eyes dancing. “I don't think I'm supposed to live in the United States. London feels like a place you can work very hard and diligently, and you can stop, and you can be in parks and nature. Living in Richmond, squashed between the Thames and Richmond Park with all the deer, on the edge of one of the most beautiful cities in the world… I couldn’t believe it.

“I love the people, I love the humour, I love Mike Leigh films. I know every country has its faults, but anytime you leave the United States, your nervous system shifts. You’re not consciously preparing for a random act of violence to occur.” (Politics is off the table today, but in 2017 Olsen said that Donald Trump’s victory had made her more determined to “represent women well”).

We almost saw more of her here, too. “I was supposed to do a play a year and a half ago in London, and it fell apart,” she reveals. “It’s a two-hander, very challenging, and the director and I really want to make it work and we want to do it in London. I don't believe plays should open on Broadway without living somewhere else. I don't think it's conducive to the performance.”

Again, shame, but we live in hope. Theatre and dance were Olsen’s true calling before she was sidetracked into film. Born in Sherman Oaks to a dancer mother and realtor father, she started acting aged four in Mary-Kate and Ashley’s stratospherically successful TV shows and straight-to-video movies. She saw close up the damaging effects of being in the media spotlight, particularly the prurience that attended the twins turning 18, and Mary-Kate’s diagnosis with anorexia.

Elizabeth apparently contemplated giving up showbiz in 2004 but later enrolled in New York’s famous Tisch school, intent on being a theatre actor (she worked in real estate, like her dad, in the summer holidays, because “I’d be useless dealing with bad customers in a restaurant”). A couple of understudy jobs on Broadway got her an audition for Sean Durkin’s 2011 film Martha Marcy May Marlene. Her performance as a recovering member of a sex cult won her acclaim: the MCU, which she joined in 2015’s Age of Ultron, made her famous, and wealthy enough to pick work she wants to do.

His Three Daughters is a case in point. The film was shot – unusually, in chronological order - by writer-director Azazel Jacobs in three weeks in a real NY apartment. “Aza is a friend,” says Olsen. “We worked together twice on a TV show called Sorry for Your Loss [the 2018 Facebook Watch series in which she played a bereaved wife], and we’re collaborating and workshopping some pieces that are very different to this. But when he shared this with me and told me his intention to get Carrie and Natasha because he’d written it with us in mind, that was enough for me, without even reading a page.”

When she did then read it, she was intrigued by her character. Christina is the youngest sister, a yoga-practising Grateful Dead fan, desperately missing her small daughter as she sings to her ailing father and tries to keep the peace between uptight Katie (Coon) and dope-smoking Rachel (Lyonne), the daughter of her dad’s second wife. Olsen often plays damaged or challenging women, while Christina is… nice? A good person?

“Yeah, I’m not usually drawn to those,” she smiles. “She has a gentle softness that I was excited about. And you know, these three are New York City women. Because I grew up watching movies with Dianne Wiest, Diane Keaton, Carole Kane, I’ve always had characters in my brain that vibrate to the neuroses and pace of New York. So it was an opportunity to do something like the films I grew up loving and continue to watch and love to this day.”

Coon and Lyonne turned out to be “highly intelligent, very funny cinephiles”. The three of them played the New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle together on their phones and developed an accelerated intimacy, not least as they virtually had to sit in each other’s laps during setups in the cramped apartment. At this point, there’s a dumb and obvious question I have to ask. Did being the younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley – two alpha attention-magnets – inform her performance?

“There are six kids in my family [she also has an older brother, and a younger half-brother and half-sister from her father’s second marriage], so I definitely have experience of returning to the family and returning to the person they want you to be,” she says carefully. “In that situation we all regress to a role that isn’t who we are now in our real lives, with the families that we’ve built.” She adds: “When I choose a character, and take on certain behaviours, I’ll often eventually realise, oh gosh, I’m channelling my mother or my sister.”

The conversation turns to Marvel. The arc of Wanda Maximoff’s character saw her battling and then recruited by the Avengers, fall in love with Vision, see him killed by Thanos, work through her grief in Wandavision, then return briefly to villainy before sacrificing herself in Doctor Strange: The Multiverse of Madness. Or did she? The franchise has pretty much established that anyone can come back from the dead – and even that Robert Downey Jr, killed off as Iron Man, can return as Doctor Doom in the forthcoming Fantastic Four reboot.

“Lots of people were texting me saying, ‘I can’t believe this about Downey, did you know?’ and I was like, ‘I have no idea what you’re taking about’ and had to go on the internet to find out,” she says. Of Wanda’s potential return she says: “There’s a Marvel brain that just lets us know [when a new movie or TV series is in train]. I adored Wandavision, which opened up a whole world for me and the character, totally different from when I first signed on 10 years ago.

“Then Multiverse of Madness was a whole different thing, but I still got to follow the thread of this woman and use her differently and surprisingly. No one's tying me up. These are choices to keep moving forward with them [Marvel]. Every time it's a conversation: what would we like to do? And it’s like returning to a family: my dialect coach, movement coach, stunt people, crew, camera operators. There’s a lot to love about being part of that.”

Our time’s almost up but I lob in a final question about Olsen’s side hustle, the Hettie Harmony children’s books she writes with her husband, designed to help children deal with anxiety. Given her innate (and learned) need for privacy, I’m expecting a curt response, but she expounds gleefully on how Arnett came up with the main character and titles and together they “riffed off each other” to create a cast list of animals that would enable children to address complicated emotions. They are now working to turn the books into an animated series.

“Our life and work is so fully connected,” she says. “It's so much fun spending our nights watching movies and talking about them and learning from them and reading books that give us ideas for writing or developing [projects]. It's so, like, completely a part of our lives that it's… yeah, it's lovely.”

His Three Daughters is in selected cinemas now and available on Netflix from September 20