VARIETY – Elizabeth Olsen told The Times of London in a recently published interview (conducted pre-strike) that she is aggressively seeking a “variation” of characters after working for four years solely in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Olsen filmed “WandaVision” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” back to back, which was perhaps too much time dedicated to only playing Scarlet Witch. That’s a large reason Olsen was drawn to playing alleged axe murderer Candy Montgomery in Max’s “Love and Death.”

“I’m trying to figure out… Because, specifically in the last four years, my output has been Marvel,” Olsen said. “I don’t want… it’s not that I don’t want to be associated as just this character. But I really feel like I need to be building other parts back up for balance. I so much want to do films right now. And I hope some of them come together in the way I feel like they can. But yeah, that’s something that I need. I just need other characters in my life. There’s no longevity in one character.”

For Olsen, both COVID and “Marvel obligations” threw a wrench into the variety of roles she started to love playing around 2017.

“’Wind River’ and ‘Ingrid Goes West’ were films that I was very proud to have selected and they were so different and you can’t compare them,” Olsen said. “So I just want more of that in my life just because I get satisfaction from the variation.”

During a conversation with “The White Lotus” star Meghann Fahy as part of Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series in June, 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.”

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.

LA Times In 1980, Texas housewife Candy Montgomery was accused of murdering her friend Betty Gore with an ax — an astounding 41 cuts were found on Gore’s body. The crime and surrounding events, including a public trial that saw Montgomery being found not guilty after pleading self-defense — saying Gore had attacked her after learning of her husband’s affair with her friend — is the sort of stranger-than-fiction tale Hollywood loves. In fact, just a year after these events played out in Hulu’s “Candy,” Max presented the story in “Love & Death.”

That limited series, written by David E. Kelley and based largely on the 1984 book “Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs,” examines the before-and-after, including the love affair between Montgomery and Gore’s husband, Allan. With the characters Candy and Allan requiring much nuance, Kelley and executive producer and director Lesli Linka Glatter, who helmed five of the seven “Love & Death” episodes, knew immediately whom to cast.

“The first choice was Elizabeth Olsen,” Glatter says in an April video call. “She goes deep, and her eyes let you into her psyche. She had a huge amount of empathy for Candy and got inside her skin. Jesse Plemons was also our first choice for Allan. Jesse is an extraordinary actor, and subtle and complicated, so I felt like we hit pay dirt.”

Olsen and Plemons both say they, in turn, were attracted to the project based on the scripts and the involvement of the writer and director. For Olsen in particular, Candy represented the type of character she’d not had the opportunity to play in a world she hadn’t previously experienced. To prepare, the actors had the book, a series of articles from Texas Monthly and court transcripts, as well as some photographs, but ultimately this wasn’t about mimicking real people.

“In the early phases, you’re just exploring the character in the story,” Plemons says. “You’re trying to gather as much information as possible, because you never know if something, even tiny little snippets out of a book, could unlock something in your mind. Then there’s a certain amount of trusting that you’ve unlocked who they are at their core, reminding yourself that you’re not making a documentary about these people, you want to be truthful and honest and respectful to who you believe they were.”

An important aspect of finding Candy on-screen was her accent and her pulled-together appearance. Although the real Montgomery had a tightly curled perm, Glatter felt that would be distracting for the viewer. Instead, Candy’s look is based on what was current and on trend at the time. Her voice reflects someone who lives in Texas but isn’t originally from there.

“We don’t have recordings of their voices, so making that choice, to me, was such a huge character moment,” Olsen says. “You all of a sudden start to feel it in your body — how these people speak and how they choose to present themselves to the world and how they use their voice to get through or hide or whatever they need to do. To me, she seemed like someone who would use her femininity to either be sweet or to try and get people to fall in love with her.”
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