Welcome to Elizabeth Olsen Source: your best source for all things related to Elizabeth Olsen. Elizabeth's breakthrough came in 2011 when she starred in critically-acclaimed movies Martha Marcy May Marlene and Silent House. She made her name in indie movies until her role in 2014 blockbuster Godzilla and then as Scarlet Witch/Wanda Maximoff in Marvel's Avengersand Captain America movies. Elizabeth starred in and was an Executive Producer for Facebook Watch's "Sorry For Your Loss". She is currently starring in WandaVision, the first Marvel TV Series on Disney+. She will also be in Marvel's Dr. Strange sequel and hopefully we'll see another indie movie from her! Enjoy the many photos(including lots of exclusives!), articles, and videos on our site!
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Press: Emmys Snubs and Surprises: Harrison Ford and Elizabeth Olsen Shut Out, ‘Jury Duty’ and ‘Daisy Jones’ Land Big Noms

Emmys Snubs and Surprises: Harrison Ford and Elizabeth Olsen Shut Out, ‘Jury Duty’ and ‘Daisy Jones’ Land Big Noms

VARIETY On one level, the biggest snub for this year’s Emmy nominations is that the looming actors strike has robbed this day of its usual joy. The writers strike, in effect since early May, has already severely curtailed celebrating the best and brightest of the 2022-23 TV season. And now, with SAG-AFTRA almost certainly joining the WGA on the picket line in a matter of hours, there’s an air of doom over what should be a happy event.

On another, less existential level, what does Harrison Ford have to do to get an Emmy nomination?! The Emmys’ diamond anniversary brought widely expected nominations for previous Emmy favorites like “Succession,” “The White Lotus,” “Abbott Elementary” and “Ted Lasso.” A new shift in rules that capped the number of names voters could submit per category was expected to keep those shows from total domination of the acting categories — but they all still managed to overwhelm the supporting and guest actor categories, along with newly crowned Emmy favorite, “The Last of Us.”

Still, there were some welcome surprise nominations, especially for under-the-radar gems like “Jury Duty,” “Bad Sisters,” and, uh, “The Diplomat.” But even in the waning days of peak TV, there were still several shows and performances that were shockingly passed over for recognition: Elizabeth Olsen hacked up her friend in that laundry room in “Love & Death” and she gets nothing?!

Here is Variety’s assessment of the biggest surprises among the nominees for the 75th annual Primetime Emmy Awards.
“1923” and ”Yellowstone” miss major nods — including for Harrison Ford!

During last year’s Emmy nominations, one of the day’s headlines was that “Yellowstone” and “1883,” Taylor Sheridan’s popular Westerns about the Dutton family, were almost entirely shut out. This year, “Yellowstone” is in a precarious place: It’s been announced that Season 5 will be its last — because star Kevin Costner wants out — but it’s unclear when Part 2 of that season will even be filmed. But Paramount+ drama series prequel “1923” was star-studded, with Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford leading the way on the show, which was quickly renewed for a second season. Yet, even with the continued popularity of the (albeit troubled) “Yellowstone” mothership, and the major stars of “1923,” Academy voters continue to shun Sheridan’s “Yellowstone”-a-verse (not what it’s called — until today!) It’s also worth noting that Ford was also not nominated in comedy supporting actor for “Shrinking,” where he was thought to be an early favorite to win.

Limited series goes bananas: “Love & Death” and “Black Bird” miss, while “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” “Daisy Jones & the Six” and … “Obi-Wan Kenobi” make it in

A powerhouse category over the last few years, limited series this year was a far more fluid beast, which is likely why there were some major upsets this year. HBO’s “Love & Death” — the second limited series about the real-life axe murderer Candy Montgomery, following 2022’s “Candy” with Jessica Biel — suffered the most, with only a single nomination, for Jesse Plemons for supporting actor. Taron Egerton and Paul Walter Hauser both earned acting nods for Apple TV+’s prison drama “Black Bird,” but the show missed for series.

On the flip side, Amazon Prime Video’s folk rock series “Daisy Jones & the Six” was a major nominee with nine nominations, including for limited series and lead actress for Riley Keough. FX’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble” also cleaned up with seven nods, including for limited series, lead actress (Lizzy Caplan) and supporting actress (Claire Danes)

But the biggest shock was the inclusion of Disney+’s “Star Wars” series “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” which debuted over a year ago and was tepidly received by many fans. Along with four below-the-line nominations, the show still managed to pick up a series nod, echoing the surprise nomination for “The Mandalorian” in drama series in 2020. The Force is indeed strong with this show.
Brian Cox — and Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin! — are all nominated for lead actor for “Succession”

July 26 2023
Gallery: “Love & Death” Update

I am finally getting caught up on things! So far just the gallery but I’m on a roll.

 
 
 

Videos below the cut
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July 24 2023
Interview: ‘Love & Death’ Star Elizabeth Olsen and Director Lesli Linka Glatter on How the HBO Max Show Depicts a “Crack in the American Dream”

The pair reunite to discuss David E. Kelley’s treatment of the infamous Texas true-crime story of Candy Montgomery, a housewife accused of killing her paramour’s wife.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER HBO/Max’s Love & Death is, in the words of its director, Lesli Linka Glatter, about an American tragedy. Following Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen), the seven-part limited series examines a Texas woman who seemingly had it all — the perfect family, the perfect marriage — but there was something darker under the surface. After she embarks on an affair with Jesse Plemons’ Allan Gore, the picture-perfect facade fades away. And the tragedy that unfolded is a shocking one: When Gore’s wife, Betty (Lily Rabe), discovers the affair, she — at least according to Montgomery’s testimony — attacked her husband’s mistress with an ax, at which point Montgomery snapped and struck Gore 41 times with the weapon.

The 1980 murder has compelled readers since it was written about in Texas Monthly — so much so that Love & Death is the second time the crime has received the limited series treatment (following last year’s Candy, starring Jessica Biel in the title role).

Glatter and Olsen spoke with THR about the films that inspired the show’s tone and what it was like to shoot the grisly murder.

What was your reaction to the project when it came your way, and did anything stick out that you thought might be a challenge?

LESLI LINKA GLATTER I read the Texas Monthly articles. If this story wasn’t true, you couldn’t make it up. I could not quite believe that this was real life. I was totally fascinated by it, because the circumstances were so beguiling and intriguing to me. And then I jumped into reading the nonfiction book, Evidence of Love. And then lo and behold, David E. Kelley had been sent the same stories. We had never worked together, and I had always wanted to. What immediately made me excited and nervous simultaneously was that there was a big tone shift. There are many things in the beginning that have an inherent humor. You have an affair that starts with people talking about it for three or four months. It’s the most unsexy beginning of any affair ever. And then, this horrible murder happens. The tone shifts pretty drastically in episode four.

ELIZABETH OLSEN Candy was a character that I felt like I hadn’t played. And then [there was] the writing. There was some quirk and absurd oddity to it. I was curious when I spoke with Lesli and David to see if that was just my perspective or if that was intentional and if that was the goal. It was a world that I was excited to play around in and a woman I wanted to understand.

As an actor, what was your way into the character, beyond just reading what was given to you?

OLSEN I always start with a voice for someone, especially if there’s regionalism or a time-period shift. I don’t know what she sounds like; there were no recordings that I could listen to. Then I was trying to find what made sense — how would someone from this place, who has the value system that I was building in my mind, use their voice? Their femininity? Their agreeableness? What in the sounds will help them get what they want? And then it was like a virus … The voice became a walk, physical gestures. It was really fun building her.

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June 13 2023
Press: Elizabeth Olsen Does Not Miss Playing Scarlet Witch and Isn’t ‘Calling Kevin Feige Every Day With Ideas’

VARIETY Elizabeth Olsen is currently on a break from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and she’s definitely enjoying it. During a conversation with “The White Lotus” star Meghann Fahy as part of Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Olsen got honest about not missing her Scarlet Witch days.

“Do you miss doing Wanda?” Fahy asked.

“No, I don’t,” Olsen responded. “I think it’s been almost 10 years of playing her. And I’ve loved it. And I think the reason why I am not calling Kevin Feige every day with ideas is because I’m really proud of what we were able to do. I think ‘WandaVision’ was a really surprising opportunity.”

Olsen added, “If someone were to tell me that I’m fired from Marvel movies, I will feel proud of what we made. And I really am just trying to figure out how to load up other films and characters so it becomes less about the Marvel of it all.”

“That’s such a great answer!” Fahy said. “It’s so honest.”

Olsen currently has no idea when or if she will return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, a character she’s been playing since 2015’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” Wanda was last seen in 2022’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” where she was crushed under a collapsing building after she sacrificed herself to destroy the Darkhold, the evil book of sorcery that had corrupted her and turned her into a villain.

“There really is so much more to explore,” Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told Variety last year. “We still haven’t touched on many of her core storylines from the comics. I’d work with Lizzie for another 100 years if we could. Anything’s possible in the multiverse! We’ll have to see.”

In interviews following the release of the “Doctor Strange” sequel, Olsen did not hide the fact that she was surprised Marvel took Scarlet Witch in such a villainous direction. The Emmy nominee said she struggled with the jump from “WandaVision,” where Scarlet Witch became a more vulnerable and fully-fleshed out character, to “Multiverse of Madness,” where she went full villain.

“At first I think I was nervous and conflicted, because I hadn’t finished ‘WandaVision’ yet, but we were almost finished,” Olsen told Variety about learning her character was becoming a villain. “And I was like, ‘Oh my god, how do I make this all work together?’ We got there; I got there. And it became an amazing opportunity to have people be won over by this woman in ‘WandaVision’ and feel for her, and then, you know, manipulate them into this film, where they get to be on her side and then feel conflicted themselves.”

Olsen previously told ScreenRant that should Scarlet Witch return to the MCU, she’s hoping the character can have a bit more humor to her. Click here to read the full “Actors on Actors” discussion between Olsen and Fahy.

 

June 11 2023
Interview: Elizabeth Olsen Knows What She Wants to Do Next

ELLE

Spoilers for Love & Death below.

Before she signed onto HBO Max’s miniseries Love & Death, Elizabeth Olsen didn’t know about Candy Montgomery, the Texan homemaker and churchgoer who, in 1980, brutally murdered her ex-lover’s wife Betty Gore with an axe. And even when she received the scripts from show creator David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) and director Lesli Linka Glatter (Mad Men), she didn’t immediately realize that it was a true story.

Audiences, however, might already be familiar Candy’s true-crime tale, if for no reason other than Hulu’s recent show Candy, starring Jessica Biel as the titular character and Melanie Lynskey as Betty. In the version featuring Olsen, the cast includes Lili Rabe (Betty), Patrick Fugit (in the role of Candy’s husband Pat) and Jesse Plemons, playing Betty’s husband, Allan Gore, who had a nearly year-long affair with Candy prior to the murdering of his wife.

At the start of their endeavor, neither Olsen nor the showrunners thought the other project was in the works. “When we were discussing doing this, we were told by multiple people that it wasn’t happening,” recalls Olsen during a recent video interview with ELLE.com. “But while we were filming, we learned that it was happening. You don’t usually sign onto something knowing that someone’s doing the same thing, because you understand it’s going to be compared,” she continues. “At this point, you just have to make peace with it. I would hope that the audiences would get something different [from this] in an interesting way.”

Love & Death, which debuts its finale today, does grant Olsen her wish when it comes to offering audiences something new, thanks in large part to Olsen’s exquisitely crafted portrayal of a restless woman out of step with her community’s conservative demands. Below, Olsen discusses her approach to Candy, some of the more challenging scenes to film through the final episode and what she would like to tackle next in her career.

What kind of responsibility goes into portraying someone who committed a true crime in terms of both empathizing with her and leaving room for the audience to have their own take?

I don’t focus on [these] pressures while filming. It’s something you think about when you make a decision and then you have to trust the creative heads of a show: your writer and your director, and trust the scripts and focus on doing your job. It’s really the before element is when you are really considering the potential weight of whether or not something makes you feel uncomfortable. I think of this event and its outcome as a kind of anomaly, which keeps people interested. Nothing really makes sense to people, the act of the crime itself as well as the outcome of the trial. And analyzing something that doesn’t make sense to us in a story is a useful way of processing things that seem frustrating and confusing to us as people.

Your performance brilliantly captures both the public persona of Candy and the private Candy. We all have those two faces, but in Candy’s case, it’s amplified because she has a performative side.

There’s a lot of research that went into these characters, but the research is limited to basically a book [Evidence of Love by James Atkinson] and some articles. Within the book, there are direct comments from the people who were a part of that, whose lives are affected, as well as letters and things like that. Specifically with her letters when she was younger, you start to understand someone’s value system. And the performance of what it means to be a woman in this location at this time is something that I was really curious about. The performative nature of femininity and how you can use it in ways to get what you want in the world was something I was curious about exploring, as well as the value systems of the location and these people.

When you think about it, there’s a lot of amazing progressive thinking going on in the late seventies, and these people chose to build a community in Texas where they could ignore those progressive changes and hold onto this idea of the nuclear family that feels dated to the fifties. And you think about what that mindset is. And I do think Candy struggled with the fact that that was her world, [because] she also understood the modernity of the time.

“The performative nature of femininity and how you can use it in ways to get what you want in the world was something I was curious about exploring”

I also think of her as someone incapable of being alone with her thoughts. That there’s always something; [she’s] someone who is so motivated by constant activity, constantly being involved in projects, building businesses. I interpreted her choice of listening to music a lot in her private time as her true inability to be alone with quiet thoughts. And the moment she is forced to have to reckon with those thoughts because of her actions is when I think you’re allowed to have a shift in the character that you see more clearly.

You and Jesse Plemons are in various intimate scenes, and I’m not just referring to sex scenes. The affair between Candy and Allan starts awkward and childlike. What went into building that together?
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May 26 2023
Interview: Elizabeth Olsen loves a puzzle

The Emmy-nominated actress plays a housewife accused of murder on HBO Max’s ‘Love & Death,’ her latest project decoding a character’s perplexing behavior.

WASHINGTON POST Elizabeth Olsen didn’t know it was a true story.

Reading an early script for “Love & Death,” the new HBO Max miniseries premiering Thursday about a small-town Texas housewife accused of ax-murdering a friend in 1980, Olsen believed Candy Montgomery’s crime to be a work of fiction. She thought the Texas Monthly articles she received with the script were short stories. It could easily have been imagined, the unsettling narrative of a woman who strikes up an affair with the husband in a fellow churchgoing couple and who, after confronted by the wife, ends up on trial for her brutal killing.

When meeting with writer David E. Kelley and director Lesli Linka Glatter, executive producers on the series, Olsen learned the truth. “It’s not O.J.,” the 34-year-old actress says, referring to the high-profile murder trial of former football player O.J. Simpson. But it still happened, and real lives were affected. She wondered how the team would present this astonishing story to audiences without sensationalizing it. And how much creative license would she be afforded in the role?

Quite a bit, it turned out. Though Montgomery was written about in the press — and in the book “Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs,” from which “Love & Death” also draws — there was little footage of her to go off. (Last year’s Hulu miniseries “Candy,” starring Jessica Biel as Montgomery, hadn’t yet been released.) Olsen created her own version of Candy to ground the series, which over seven episodes explores how someone so ambitious and well-liked by her community could also behave selfishly and contain a lurking darkness.

The balance is difficult to master, but Olsen has walked such tightropes before — recently for her Emmy-nominated performance as a tortured witch in Marvel Studios’ “WandaVision,” but also dating back to her debut feature role as a disoriented cult survivor in 2011’s “Martha Marcy May Marlene.” All mixed up in disturbing crimes, these characters don’t always endear themselves to viewers. The actress, however, savors the challenge of deciphering perplexing behavior.

“I don’t know what people want out of something they’re watching, besides the baseline of being entertained,” Olsen says. “But I do think we want to watch people fail and see how they resolve whatever the failure is. I think we want to watch people make decisions we think we’d never make because it’s like trying to watch someone work themselves out of a puzzle.”

Glatter thought to cast Olsen because of her performance in “Martha,” which the director says left her “gobsmacked.” Olsen was unknown at the time outside of being a younger sister to child stars Mary-Kate and Ashley, who in the past had looped her into their on-screen antics, including a 1994 music video in which they implored a forlorn-looking little Lizzie to “B-U-T-T out” of their business. In a way, she did; Olsen opted out of acting as a child and trained as a young adult at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

While Olsen always wanted to act — the desire is “so embedded in every memory I have,” she says — insecurities got the best of her early on. It wasn’t just the potential comparisons to her sisters, but growing up around so many aspiring actors in Los Angeles that convinced her that she needed to first figure out, as she recalls, “Who am I? And how am I different? And how am I unique?”

She wanted to earn her spot in the industry, and NYU — along with the affiliated Atlantic Theater Company and the Moscow Art Theatre School, where she spent a semester — helped her get there.

“Martha,” in which the title character readjusts to life with her family after fleeing an abusive cult, was one of two projects Olsen starred in at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. (The other was the psychological horror film “Silent House.”) Filmmaker Sean Durkin recalls auditioning “hundreds of people” in search of an actress who could convey discomposure alongside “quiet survival and strength.”

When Olsen came in to read, “there was something in her first take, even,” Durkin says. “It was instant. There was a presence, a vulnerability, an openness and a weight to her.”

Sarah Paulson, who played Martha’s estranged sister, says Olsen made her nervous on set, the way you feel “when you’re in the presence of something that’s about to explode.” Dialogue is sparse throughout the film, which relies heavily on its cast physically relaying emotion. Paulson was struck early on by Olsen’s ability “to have every single thing inside of her come out through those orbs we call eyeballs on her face,” a clear movie-star quality.

She likens the experience to working with Lupita Nyong’o on her debut, “12 Years a Slave.”

“I’ve been lucky in that I’ve had these two very unique experiences … where I’ve had a front-row seat to the moment before they belonged to the masses, before anyone had ever experienced the power of them,” Paulson says. She describes Olsen as “endlessly watchable.”
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May 08 2023
Interview: Elizabeth Olsen Isn’t Here to Judge Anyone, Including Her Characters

The Love & Death star talks taking on the story of Candy Montgomery.

HARPER’S BAZAAREElizabeth Olsen doesn’t like true-crime stories, nor was she looking to star in another show on the heels of the critical success of WandaVision and Sorry for Your Loss. But when the Emmy-winning writer and producer David E. Kelley approached her about playing Candace “Candy” Montgomery, the suburban Texas housewife who was accused (but never convicted) of the brutal axe murder of her neighbor Betty Gore in 1980, Olsen found herself unable to turn down an opportunity to re-examine a case that had been ripped from the headlines.

“The thing that I found interesting about [Love & Death] was this portrait of a woman who didn’t feel like someone who was diagnosable, like [with] multiple personality disorder,” Olsen tells BAZAAR.com on a recent video call from New York City. “It was someone who was put in such absurd circumstances. What are all the steps that led to the decision making that happened and for the decision making to have gone so wrong? What happens in someone’s life that leads to that? So it’s not so much about the sensationalizing of a murder, but it was more a character study that I thought could be interesting.”

Created by Kelley and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter (Twin Peaks, Mad Men, Homeland), the seven-part HBO Max series, which premieres today, stars Olsen as Candy; Lily Rabe as Betty; Patrick Fugit as Candy’s husband, Pat; and Jesse Plemons as Betty’s husband, Allan, whose 10-month affair with Candy preceded his wife’s demise. Following a 1990 made-for-TV movie starring Barbara Hershey and a recent five-part Hulu series starring Jessica Biel (which Olsen has yet to watch), Love & Death is just the latest project to revisit this true story, which Olsen feels is “stranger than fiction.”

Below, Olsen discusses the research and preparation that went into her portrayal of Candy, her attraction to playing characters that make morally questionable decisions, and her future as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch in the MCU.

You used John Bloom and Jim Atkinson’s book, Evidence of Love, as a guide to fill in any gaps in the story for your portrayal of Candy. How did your research inform your approach to the character, and what was the essence that you wanted to capture about Candy and the women of that era?
What I learned most about Candy from that book was just an insight [into] a state of mind of emotional intelligence and youth. I found the letters that she wrote to Pat when they were courting each other. It was all very pure. [There was] an idealized way to communicate with someone you think you’re supposed to love in order to fulfill the dreams that you have. She also read a lot of airport romance novels. So I think those were really informative of someone’s expectations of themselves and others and what they want to project out to the world.

And just basic things like trying to figure out how she talks, because I don’t have a recording of her voice. [With] someone who’s moved around so much, there’s still ways to have regional qualities of speech, depending on how much time you’ve spent and where. She’s moved around all over, including France. I thought of her as someone who thinks of herself as this well-traveled woman because of being an army brat. There are elements like that where we were like, “Oh, and she would have this kind of top, because it’s a little bit elevated from what most people would normally wear.” Things like that just made her feel like she had a step up in the world—that was really all about the illusion of projecting some sort of idealism.

Given that there were two women involved in this crime and only one lived to tell her side of the story, how did you all come to an agreement of what you wanted to portray as the truth?
My job was to tell what her truth was that she presented and allow for space for there to potentially be another truth. In performance, there are opportunities to maybe create a window into “Maybe there’s another truth besides the one that I’m telling.” But ultimately, it wasn’t a conversation I had with David or with Lesli. The only thing I can compare it to, really, is in Martha Marcy May Marlene, I never really talked to [writer and director] Sean Durkin about what he perceived to be the truth or the reality. All I was thinking about was my reality, and we realized while we were doing press for that movie that he never actually told me what he thinks about the ending, and I never asked because in my mind it doesn’t matter.

I think what’s interesting is sometimes when you have characters, there’s a truth that I decide about the character, and then there’s a truth that the director decides about the world, and sometimes those [truths] not being aligned could create an illusion of tension that could be interesting—or there could just be confusion. But whether or not Lesli thinks she’s just a liar, I don’t know.

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May 08 2023