Elizabeth Olsen wasn't convinced a Marvel TV show would work before WandaVision

Well, fair enough, Ms. Scarlet Witch. Nevertheless, Olsen concedes it was a “career curveball” to keep playing Wanda Maximoff after Avengers: Endgame, or at least it was a curveball to bring her to the small screen. “I was really scared about doing a Marvel project for TV, because these are otherworldly, larger-than-life characters that are seen in films, and I didn’t know if it would still work on a television at home,” she says. “But I had confidence in the format because the storytelling really honored the TV medium.”

Of course, WandaVision was a huge success, and unlike other Marvel TV output, it earned praise from audiences and critics alike (plus a ton of Emmy nominations). It even launched multiple spin-off series, including a brand new Vision show and the imminent Agatha All Along. But at the time—before the MCU had launched any shows on Disney+, and Marvel’s TV output wasn’t super interconnected to the films—the show felt like “Marvel’s weird cousin,” according to Olsen. In other words, its popularity was also a curveball. “We didn’t know it was going to have such a response. It came out during the pandemic and it almost had way more relevance to everyone’s lives; [we were all] trying to function in these bubbles that we were put in, and then there was this world outside of a bubble,” she recalls. “No one even knew what reality was at that point!”