USA TODAY — If you need an Instagram-worthy brunch snap, probably don’t pass your smartphone to Martha Stewart.
“She’s the worst food photographer in the whole world — she makes Jean-Georges food look like dog food,” jokes Elizabeth Olsen, who admits her own nosh photos are similarly unappetizing. “My life revolves around prepping dinner for my family or friends, and making my breakfast look nice, but (my pictures) always look bad. It’s like Martha.”
Fortunately, Olsen’s foray into food photography was only to research her role as an enviable Instagram “influencer” in dark comedy Ingrid Goes West (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expands nationwide Aug. 25), one of two films she stars in this month, the other being Taylor Sheridan’s chilly murder mystery Wind River (now showing in New York and Los Angeles; expands to 17 cities Friday, including San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia).
In the latter, Olsen, 28, co-stars with her Avengers castmate Jeremy Renner as Jane Banner, a rookie FBI agent assigned to investigate the rape and death of a young Native American woman on Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation.
Signing on,she hoped to shed light on female sexual assault, particularly in the Native American community, where missing women often go unreported. The actress also wanted “to play someone with the confidence and fortitude of Jane,” Olsen says. “She’s not jaded yet and emotionally invests in trying to find out what happened.”
The Olsen twins’ younger sister was timorous about a winter shoot in the Utah wilderness, but wound up having “the best time,” she says, learning to snowmobile and training in both martial arts and gun work.
The frosty conditions only sweetened her return to Los Angeles a few months later, when she slipped into the boho-chic garb of Ingrid’s Taylor Sloane, who becomes the social-media obsession and narcissistic BFF of Aubrey Plaza’s stalkerish title character.