The Scarlet Witch and indie darling (who can next be seen as the apex of a love triangle with Miles Teller and Callum Turner in Eternity) has managed to build an A-list Hollywood career while (mostly) avoiding the tabloid pitfalls of fame. But she says she’s not purposefully enigmatic. Some things are just none of your business.

 
INSTYLE “Mom Tok?”

It’s Friday night in the Valley and I am explaining The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives to Elizabeth Olsen while sharing a baguette. (Let that sink in for a second.)

“Ah, sexy moms,” she nods. “Mmm. In Utah. This is a reality show?”

The Marvel star and indie queen—known for TV series like WandaVision, Love & Death, and Sorry for Your Loss, which she co-produced, and films such as Wind River, Ingrid Goes West, and the upcoming Panic Carefully with Julia Roberts—is genuinely baffled at the premise of a popular unscripted series about young mothers whose common bond is TikTok, hair extensions, and Jesus Christ. “You have to understand,” she says with a shrug, turning back to the salad we’re splitting. “I’m, like, a 90-year-old. If someone new is around, my friends tell them, ‘You have to talk to Lizzie like she’s a Boomer.’”

For the record, when at home here in Los Angeles or in Northern California, where she also resides, Olsen and her husband, the writer and musician Robbie Arnett, watch a lot of movies. They are also watching The Sopranos for the first time (“it’s given me nightmares”). She only indulges in non-prestige (some would say “trashy”) television when in hotel rooms—“that stuff can’t come into the home”—and is such a dedicated sports fan (all of them) that she watches TV via cable “with a hard line so it doesn’t glitch and I miss things.”

Olsen picks up a piece of lettuce with her fingers. Her big green eyes, Margaret Keane–style saucers that have been formidable on-screen foes to Aubrey Plaza, Kathryn Hahn, Iron Man, Jesse Plemons, and Godzilla, grow even larger. “She’s heavily dressed. I should have warned you.” She plops the leaf in her mouth.

This bistro is one of her spots. It’s on Ventura Boulevard, on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains from Beverly Hills, in the San Fernando Valley. When Olsen, 36, walked in, the only heads that turned were those of the waitstaff, who greeted her casually as she made her way to our table—tousled hair, a red topcoat draped over her shoulders waving behind her like a cape. The only tell that she’s famous, the common denominator amongst Higher Beings when they mix with us proletariat: skin so pristine her face almost appears differently lit, as though inserted into the dining room in post-production A.I.

We’re not far from where Olsen lives today, or her childhood home. But she shakes her head when I declare she grew up “in Hollywood.”

“I mean, yes and no. Other than the fact that, like, kids in our house were working, it felt very much like a strict, disciplined household. My sisters always went to a school.” She tears off a hunk of bread and slathers it with bright yellow butter.

Her sisters are, of course, Mary-Kate and Ashley. Three years older, they are the “You got it dude!” Olsens. The New York Minute Olsens. The perfect-gray-sweater-for-$1500-by-The-Row Olsens. As those two were working, Young Elizabeth, for a short time, considered performing professionally as well.

“I thought I wanted to be a child actor, but then my ballet teacher wouldn’t put me in The Nutcracker because I’d missed so many rehearsals. And that was the only Nutcracker I wasn’t in my whole life because I was auditioning for TV or film or whatever.” Somehow, at that moment and barely 10, she could see the future. “I wanted to have the career I have now, but I didn’t need to do it until later. I wanted to do recess with my friends.”

Later was 15 years ago, when she stormed the Sundance Film Festival with Martha Marcy May Marlene, a tight, tense thriller about a young woman leaving a cult, co-starring Sarah Paulson. (I tell her that an alternate timeline—Marvel reference—has her working for 30 years, if you count appearing with her sisters in How the West Was Fun. She laughs. “Okay, then I’ve been ‘playing’ for 30 years, because that was not professional!”)
Read the rest of this entry