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

Those cinephiles among us who are against the Superhero Industrial Complex like to joke that our great actors are getting contractually imprisoned in the Marvel machine, Elizabeth Olsen assures us that this is not the case. “No one forced me to do that!” she says of WandaVision in a new interview for Harper’s Bazaar. “I have made a choice to continue on with Marvel, and they’ve made a choice to continue on with me.”

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!”