Elizabeth Olsen has expressed her desire to make movies outside the Marvel franchise that are more to her “personal taste.”
Marvel’s cosmos of film and TV may have made Elizabeth Olsen a global movie star, but she’s recently expressed her desire to make movies that are closer to her “personal taste.” She’s also reflected on Marvel’s changing cultural status, and suggests that attitudes towards it have changed since she first played Wanda Maximoff over a decade ago.
“When I started Marvel, I thought the movies were so, so great,” Olsen said on the Wild Card podcast (via IndieWire). “I thought they were such great Greek-type scale stories that reflected politics and culture in a really lovely way, and so I felt really proud to jump into it.”
In more recent years, however, Olsen says “it’s taken on this narrative of, it’s a hot take: whether an actor says they want to or if they would never do a Marvel movie or not.”
Olsen first played Maximoff – otherwise known as Scarlet Witch – in 2014, having briefly appeared in the post-credits scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. She’s reprised the role multiple times since, both in movies (Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame and more besides) and her own Disney+ TV series, WandaVision.
The years playing a comic book necromancer appear to have left Olsen hankering for other roles, however. “I think that is why, because I’ve spent so many years doing Marvel, that I feel like all the other jobs I have to do have to really reflect my personal taste,” she said.
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“Because as much as I love being a part of this world – and I’m proud of what I’ve been able to do with the character – it’s not really the art that I consume, which I’ve been very, I think, honest about […] I think I haven’t always successfully made choices in my work that are aligned with my personal taste and that is something I feel like I’m still trying to prove when I meet people, especially if it’s a work-type meeting.”
Whether this means Olsen’s time as Scarlet Witch is coming to an end or not we don’t know. But it’s perhaps telling that, in Marvel’s seemingly endless casting announcement for 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday, Olsen wasn’t among them the lengthy list of names.
Olsen made her film debut in 2011 with the terrific indie drama Martha Marcy May Marlene, and has since interspersed her Marvel career with smaller-scale yet acclaimed movies, including the black comedy Ingrid Goes West (alongside Aubrey Plaza) and Taylor Sheridan’s bleak thriller Wind River, both released in 2017. More recently, she’s starred with Alicia Vikander and Himesh Patel in the low-budget sci-fi drama The Assessment, which has been warmly received at film festivals.
By the sounds of things, we’ll be seeing more left-field film choices from Olsen in the future.
