Elizabeth Olsen’s Sister Act
Death has been on Elizabeth Olsen’s mind lately. It started — or, rather, became much more acute — on a recent helicopter ride. The actress was on an East Coast press tour for her new movie, His Three Daughters, and Netflix scheduled a junket day in New York City, followed by a screening out in the Hamptons. The tight turnaround meant that Olsen, her co-star Natasha Lyonne and a studio rep had only one way to get there in time.
“I’ll never do it again,” she says. “It was 45 minutes straight of me creating a narrative about how I’m going to die.” As she’s telling this story, she divulges that, actually, she thinks about her own death all the time. The notion of the chopper hurtling over greater Long Island takes its place in line behind car accidents and random acts of violence.
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“Whenever I’m stopping at a red light, I make sure to stagger my car so that I don’t line up with the window of the driver right beside me,” she says. “I think it might have to do with growing up in L.A. during an era when kidnappings were a popular topic of the news.”
The actress, 35, knows she has a tendency to say things that can be taken out of context — “My problem is that I’m not strategic enough about what I say. I’ve said things, and I’m like, ‘Oh shit, Lizzie’ ” — so it’s worth putting on the record that she doesn’t sound or seem crazy as she talks about imagining her own demise.
In fact, she seems deeply calm and confident. (Her Daughters co-star Carrie Coon’s first impression of Olsen feels apt here: “She was plain-spoken, honest and self-effacing, and so upright in posture and deed.”) We’re having coffee at the café attached to her local fishmonger (she needs to get a branzino to cook at home later), and she’s wearing an outfit that appears, to the semi-trained eye, to be head-to-toe The Row, the fashion brand owned by her older sisters, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. It’s impossible to seem anything but aggressively centered when one is draped in luxury silks, to say nothing of the grounded practicality of having a local fishmonger.
Perhaps not surprisingly, His Three Daughters also is about death. A darkly funny, deeply affecting story about sisters — Olsen, Lyonne and Coon — who return to their father’s Lower East Side apartment during his last days of hospice care, it is simultaneously a return to form for Olsen and the start of a new era in her career.
Before her years spent fronting Marvel blockbusters, she worked almost entirely in independent film — projects like Martha Marcy May Marlene, the cult thriller she booked after graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg biopic Kill Your Darlings and Neon’s Ingrid Goes West. Daughters is a return to the prestige projects she favored early in her career.
But more than that, she sees her work on the movie as emblematic of the career she’d like to build going forward. Daughters, which drops Sept. 20 on Netflix, was essentially made in a vacuum. Director Azazel Jacobs wrote the screenplay with all three actresses in mind — he met Olsen when he directed an episode of her show Sorry for Your Loss (in which she played a young widow) in 2018, and the two stayed in touch as friends and hopeful collaborators — and they filmed Daughters on a shoestring budget over 17 days. When they brought it to last year’s Toronto Film Festival, Netflix acquired worldwide rights for a reported $7 million. Everyone involved made money on the deal, and Olsen wants to keep replicating the process as much as she can. She’s also newly open to using the power of her own name to jump-start projects she believes in to make that happen.
“I always understood that films would look for financing, but I didn’t understand the impact that I could have if I became more invested in that part,” she says.
Dries Van Noten pantsuit.
“During the pitch process, I can get us into rooms, and now I’m trying to take advantage of that.” She hasn’t formed a production company, but she sees what Dakota Johnson (TeaTime) and Emma Stone (Fruit Tree) are doing with their banners, how they can make movies come together by showing up. Now, she’s spending her days — when she isn’t on set or a press tour — taking meetings to pitch projects she’s hoping to get off the ground, or figuring out how to salvage movies that the old version of herself would have given up on (like Todd Solondz’s Love Child, with Charles Melton, which is experiencing a stall). “I’m in a stage where I want to try to put my neck out in a way that I haven’t before,” she says.
It might seem obvious that a famous person could — and should — trade their stature for clout and opportunity, but Olsen is on a constant journey with acceptance of her celebrity and what it means to her. For years, she was on Instagram promoting her projects — and a version of herself — to her fans, but she quit the platform in 2020 because it felt “dirty.” She acknowledges that being social media-less means she needs to show up, promotionally, in other ways and requires her to give up the supplemental income she’d been earning from her content, but she’s fine with that. “I understand why people need that money, because, in this business, you basically only take home 50 percent of what you make, but I’d rather just adjust my lifestyle to accommodate what I’m willing to do; I don’t need too much, I feel very good,” she says. “It’s also hard to sustain a certain level [of wealth], and I’m not chasing that.”
Growing up in her Sherman Oaks home, despite (or perhaps because of) her older sisters’ child-acting empire, her family made it a priority to keep the sisters grounded. “I never craved the wrong things in the industry because nobody in my family ever valued it,” she says. “My parents, my sisters, no one in my family valued fame. Acting was always about being someone who worked and got to continue to work. My dad’s biggest thing was equality. Obviously, my sisters were working, so it was important to teach us that no one’s better than one other person in the family.”
Try as she might, though, she’s very famous. And while she has her boundaries, she’s not above doing what needs to be done in the name of a paycheck. She’s endured the minor yet very specific humiliations of greenscreen acting in superhero tentpoles. Olsen describes it, with a laugh, as “acting with nothing,” referring to the side of CGI work that viewers don’t see. “You really have to embrace this dumb point of view, where you feel like a 7-year-old playing make-believe. I do believe that at some point they should release a full version of one of the movies, without any of the special effects so people can see how hard it is.”
In 2014’s Godzilla, she played Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s wife — who also was the mother of a school-aged son — when she was 23. It was emblematic of another sort of humiliation that big-budget films love to toss onto their young actresses, but Olsen says she isn’t triggered by the prospect of entering Mom-Role-Age. “Dude, I’ve played so many mothers over the years,” she deadpans. “So I don’t get in my head with that. There are lots of different people of different ages who are mothers. And I have so many friends with kids in my life, so it feels natural.” Olsen has not ventured into motherhood herself yet, though she says she’s had friends and fellow actresses advising her to freeze her eggs, and she describes her point of view toward the prospect of growing a family as “very zen.”
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Back at the fish shop, a stranger’s Corgi plops itself next to Olsen’s feet (clad in fisherman sandals, almost certainly by The Row), which she declares to be the most charming thing she’s ever seen a dog do. The owner tells us her name is Bella, and the conversation pivots back to death -— her mother’s dog, also Bella, recently had to be put down — and then to her childhood. The family took in a rotating cast of senior dogs, causing little Lizzie to conclude that dog lifespans were only three to four years long.
From a young age, she noticed that she didn’t form attachments to things the way the other children did. She would force herself to try out different toys, noticing the way her friends toted around stuffed animals or loved their blankies into rags, but it never stuck. Now, as an adult, she describes herself as too skeptical and critical to get obsessed over much. The detachment serves her well professionally, allowing her to move from job to job without getting sad about saying goodbye to castmates, though occasionally a connection cuts through — and the one between Olsen, Coon and Lyonne is particularly deep.
“We got on like immediate soul sisters,” says Lyonne. “We felt safe making each other double over laughing or getting down to the nitty-gritty of what makes life feel so relentlessly sticky.” Between scenes, Jacobs would find the women lounging, literally intertwined. “I’d look in and just see legs jumbled on top of each other,” he says. “Sometimes they were playing Wordle or they’d be talking about their lives.” Olsen says their text chain, ever the test of industry friendships, has been going nonstop since they met in 2022.
Her character in His Three Daughters is a Deadhead who has mostly given up following the band around in order to raise her young daughter in an unnamed flyover state. Jacobs says Olsen and her onscreen counterpart share a simultaneous gentleness and strength, but the similarities stop there. She’s never been to a Grateful Dead show and can’t fathom being an extreme fan of anything. What about Taylor Swift, you ask? Not a chance: “I don’t think I’m going to have that experience in my life. It sounds spectacular to watch someone do something that physically demanding for that many hours, but whatever it is that surrounds her shows sounds overwhelming.” She says she’d be more at home at a Lana Del Rey concert (she has a friend who plays with her), but only if it’s outside L.A. and that the closest thing she can stomach, crowd-wise, to the Eras Tour is a Dodger game. “That’s as much chaos and groupthink as I can do.”
This refusal to fangirl no doubt is related to her lack-of-attachments thing, she says. But there are things in life she does get excited about. She’s a tried-and-true cinephile and is enamored with Radu Jude’s black comedy feature Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. She’s trying to track down a hard copy of Leos Carax’s film The Lovers on the Bridge to add to her collection. (Lyonne describes bearing witness to Olsen’s encyclopedic knowledge as “basking in the golden glow of her tethering herself inextricably to precious and nuanced lineage.”) She just read and loved When We Cease to Understand the World by Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut.
“The books I read are esoteric usually, and they are dense,” she says, though she also loves Miranda July and has been waiting to carve out dedicated time to read her acclaimed novel All Fours. Olsen also plumbs deep on the topics of restaurants, gardening and the food supply chain at the fish shop where she’s also on a first-name basis with the employees (Omar is working today). And she’s endlessly absorbed by her job and can tune out the rest of her life as soon as she arrives on set. “I’m the baby in my family, so it made me independent and autonomous, and that’s why I love the escape,” she says. “I totally use this job to escape all responsibilities in my life, and I never want to stop.”
This story appeared in the Sept. 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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