Elizabeth Olsen, the Scarlet Witch actress who says no to films that skip cinemas

Elizabeth Olsen

Photo: Kevin Paul / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 16, 1989 Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California, USA
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Awards	Emmy (nomination) · SAG Award (nomination) · Critics' Choice (nomination) · Saturn Award (nomination) · Critics' Choice

Elizabeth Olsen has a rule, and lately she has been saying it out loud. If a studio wants her for a film, that film has to reach cinemas, with the release guaranteed before she signs. An independent picture that can only find a buyer among the streamers is fine, she told InStyle, “but I don’t want to make something where streaming is the end-all.” Her reason sounded closer to a sports fan than a film purist: “I think it’s important for people to gather as a community, to see other humans, be together in a space.” It is a striking condition from an actress whose most celebrated performance went straight to Disney+, and it says a good deal about how she has chosen to spend the leverage the Scarlet Witch handed her.

That leverage was never supposed to come easily, because the surname arrived before she did. She grew up as the younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, child stars whose name was for most of her adolescence a brand printed on clothes, videotapes and magazine covers. She thought seriously about acting under her middle name, Chase, so that casting directors would meet an actress instead of a family. In the end she kept the surname and changed the context around it, choosing roles that looked nothing like her sisters’ work, starting with a young woman who cannot tell whether she has escaped a cult or carried it home with her.

She was born on 16 February 1989 in Sherman Oaks, on the San Fernando Valley side of Los Angeles. Her mother, Jarnie, was a former dancer who became a personal manager; her father, Dave, worked in real estate. As a small child she turned up in her sisters’ productions, including the television film How the West Was Fun, and at five she was even signed to the children’s label that released their records, although she never recorded a note. Ballet took over for a while. She drifted back to acting in high school, nearly gave it up in 2004 when the tabloids descended on Mary-Kate’s eating disorder, and then went east to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Alongside her drama degree she took classes at the Atlantic Theater Company and spent a semester at the Moscow Art Theatre School, which she has described as the place where she began to take the work seriously. Understudy jobs, off-Broadway in Dust and on Broadway in Impressionism, got her an agent. The diploma only came in January 2013, by which point the films had already started.

Martha Marcy May Marlene, the first feature by Sean Durkin, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011 and drew praise for the film and for her above all. She played a young woman who flees an abusive commune and moves in with her sister, unable to separate memory from threat, and she has said the part appealed to her because of a long fascination with mental illness. The role brought nominations for the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Actress and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead, and in early 2013 she was shortlisted for the BAFTA Rising Star Award. The horror film Silent House, which had premiered at the same Sundance, followed, and so did a run of deliberately mixed choices: Edie Parker, Jack Kerouac’s first wife, in Kill Your Darlings; a nurse in Spike Lee’s American remake of Oldboy; Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin in In Secret. On stage she played Juliet off-Broadway, and Ben Brantley of The New York Times described her performance as “alternating between saucy petulance and hysteria.” Then came Godzilla, which grossed $529 million worldwide and gave her a first taste of very large audiences.

Marvel found her in a post-credits scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014, and the following year she became Wanda Maximoff in Avengers: Age of Ultron, the character’s first appearance on film, speaking with an accent from the invented country of Sokovia that she compared to Slovak. She came back for Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, which became the second highest-grossing film ever made. Between the ensemble pictures she kept a parallel career alive. She was Audrey Williams opposite Tom Hiddleston‘s Hank Williams in I Saw the Light; a rookie FBI agent in Taylor Sheridan‘s Wind River; and a social media influencer in Ingrid Goes West, a performance Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers called “toxic perfection.” She also executive produced and starred in Sorry for Your Loss, a Facebook Watch series about a young widow named Leigh Shaw that earned her a Critics’ Choice Television Award nomination before it was cancelled in January 2020 after two seasons.

WandaVision, which premiered on Disney+ in January 2021, was the moment the franchise gave her the centre of the frame. Opposite Paul Bettany’s Vision, she worked through decades of American sitcom styles while the series slowly revealed itself as a study of grief. Linda Holmes of NPR wrote of her “indelible central performance.” The show collected 23 Emmy nominations, including one for Olsen as lead actress in a limited series, a category Kate Winslet won for Mare of Easttown. Olsen was also nominated for a Golden Globe, and at the Critics’ Choice Super Awards in 2022 she won Best Actress in a Superhero Series.

The next step is where the official story and the record part ways. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, released in May 2022, turned Wanda into the film’s antagonist, a mother willing to tear through universes to reach children who exist only in another reality. It asked audiences to believe that the woman who had let her invented family go at the end of WandaVision would now hunt a teenager to get them back. Reviews were mixed. Her own work was the part critics singled out, with Owen Gleiberman writing in Variety that it “generates an operatic fire,” while the script’s logic was the part people argued about. The usual reading since then is that she walked away from Marvel. She has said the opposite. Promoting Eternity in November 2025, she said she was not in Avengers: Doomsday and had no idea how or when Wanda might return, and she told InStyle that she would “jump at the opportunity to be in her shoes again.” Her only Marvel work since Multiverse of Madness has been a voice role as a variant of Wanda in the animated Marvel Zombies. She has left the door open and stopped waiting beside it.

What she did instead was Love & Death, the HBO Max limited series written by David E. Kelley that premiered in April 2023. She played Candy Montgomery, the churchgoing housewife from Wylie, Texas, who in 1980 killed her friend Betty Gore with forty-one blows of an axe after an affair with Betty’s husband, and was acquitted by a jury. Olsen played the gap between the friendly neighbour and the act without trying to resolve it, and the performance earned her a second Golden Globe nomination. Max later announced that it had become its most-watched original limited series worldwide.

The films that followed were smaller and tighter. In Azazel Jacobs’s His Three Daughters, she, Carrie Coon and Natasha Lyonne played estranged sisters keeping vigil over their dying father, in a story shot inside a single New York apartment; Netflix bought it after its Toronto premiere for a reported $7 million and gave it a short run in cinemas before streaming it in September 2024. In The Assessment, Fleur Fortuné’s first feature, she and Himesh Patel played a couple in a near future where parenthood requires a state examination, and Alicia Vikander played the examiner. Then came Eternity, David Freyne’s afterlife comedy for A24, which she also executive produced. Her Joan has one week to decide whether to spend forever with the husband she shared sixty-five years with, played by Miles Teller, or with the first husband who died young, played by Callum Turner. It opened in American cinemas on 26 November 2025.

Seen together, those choices explain the rule she described to InStyle. Every film since Multiverse of Madness has been made outside the studio system, and the one that was bought by a streamer still received a theatrical window. The paradox is real: the work that made her a global name lives on a subscription service, and the actress it made is now one of the few with enough standing to insist on a cinema screen.

Her private life stays private by design. She is married to Robbie Arnett, a musician from the band Milo Greene; they became engaged in July 2019 after about three years together and married quietly, without an announcement. Together they wrote two picture books, Hattie Harmony: Worry Detective in 2022 and Hattie Harmony: Opening Night in 2023, both drawn from their own experience of anxiety. She has named Diane Keaton as the actress who showed her what kind of woman she wanted to be, explaining that she had never seen herself on screen: “I’m not the sexy one, I’m not the nerd, I don’t know where I fit.” She talks warmly about her sisters and does not trade on them.

The calendar ahead is full. Panic Carefully, the paranoid thriller written and directed by Sam Esmail, puts her alongside Julia Roberts, Eddie Redmayne and Brian Tyree Henry; it was shot in London, with Canary Wharf dressed up as Manhattan, and Warner Bros. has moved it to 9 April 2027 in cinemas and IMAX, exactly the kind of release her rule asks for. Todd Solondz’s dark comedy Love Child, with Charles Melton, is still waiting on financing; she has said openly that it is having a hard time getting made. The project closest to her is television. Seven Sisters, created by the playwright Will Arbery and ordered to series by FX in December 2025, will stream on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ elsewhere. She plays Adrienne, a woman who begins to hear a voice nobody else can hear, in a family that includes Cristin Milioti, Anthony Edwards and J. Smith-Cameron. The pilot was directed by Sean Durkin, the filmmaker who gave her Martha Marcy May Marlene, and the full production is due to start in Vancouver in late November 2026. Fifteen years after their first film together, the director who gave her a first lead role will be the one pointing a camera at her next.

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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) — Eternity (2025) — as Joan

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