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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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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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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