Finding her own path

Theater won out over volleyball

At 14 or 15, Elizabeth Olsen pictured a college volleyball scholarship. She also loved musical theater. A high-school teacher introduced her to theater history, and she decided to focus on acting.[3]

Her older sisters, Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen, had grown up on television. Olsen still recalled feeling embarrassed to say she wanted to act. She went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and earned her Drama BFA in 2013. In a later WIRED interview, she joked that graduation took five and a half years.[3][2][1]

A career in range

Selected work, at a glance

A career with range

Troubled lives, dark comedy, and quiet care

Her breakthrough came in Martha Marcy May Marlene in 2011. She played a young woman trying to settle back into family life after escaping a cult. The film asked her to show Martha’s fear and confusion through quiet, carefully controlled acting.[4][3]

Different films brought different kinds of pressure. In Ingrid Goes West, she played Taylor Sloane, a social-media star whose polished life becomes another woman’s obsession. Wind River paired her with Jeremy Renner in a harsh crime story: her FBI agent, Jane Banner, needs help from a local tracker to investigate a young woman’s death. Neither role offers much comfort, but both give Olsen room to show the strain beneath a person’s outward confidence.[7][8]

His Three Daughters makes its drama much smaller in scale. Olsen, Carrie Coon, and Natasha Lyonne play sisters gathered around their dying father. To build their bond, the actors rehearsed together and shared space in the building where they filmed. Their daily routines even included a shared obsession with the New York Times game Spelling Bee. That small detail helps explain how a convincing screen family can grow out of ordinary time spent together.[11]

Olsen is also widely known as Wanda Maximoff, or Scarlet Witch. Her first appearance came in a credits scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014. WandaVision later let her and Paul Bettany work through several eras of television comedy while telling a longer story about love and grief. It is one part of a career that moves between very different kinds of work.[9][10]

A project made together

Helping children put a name to worry

Olsen and musician Robbie Arnett have a partnership beyond their marriage. They wrote Hattie Harmony: Worry Detective together, with illustrations by Marissa Valdez. Published in 2022, the picture book follows a character who helps friends cope with everyday fears, from speaking in class to riding the bus. When Hattie becomes worried herself, she needs the same kind of help she offers others.[6]

The project brings a gentler side of Olsen’s work into view. Her adult roles often explore people under heavy emotional strain; Hattie introduces children to simple ways of noticing and handling worry. Olsen and Arnett also discussed their marriage in a 2022 SiriusXM interview. They said they had eloped before the pandemic and held a wedding at another time.[6][5]

A closer look

Three ways into the work

Her words over time

What has she said about God and the afterlife?

In a 2013 interview with Caroline Ryder for Dazed, Olsen looked back on telling her parents at 13 that she no longer believed in God. She linked that decision to concerns about religion limiting women’s freedom. She also spoke about valuing community and a place to pray. This was her account of a teenage turning point, shared years later.[13]

Her April 2025 conversation with NPR’s Rachel Martin explored a different question: is there more to reality than we can see or feel? Olsen’s first response was yes. She said organized religion and moon ceremonies did not feel like home to her, and she disliked the word spirituality. Instead, she used atemporal to describe parts of human life, such as love and creativity, that cannot be measured. She was trying to find language that fit her experience.[14]

On December 13, 2025, Ynet published an interview about her film Eternity. Olsen said she did not have a clear idea of the afterlife and did not really believe in life after death. Yet she admired people and cultures with that hope and wished for a stronger connection to it herself. Her answers hold doubt and curiosity together. A single old label leaves much of that conversation out.[15]

Listen to the person

In their own words

People connected to the story

Follow the connections

Jeremy Renner

Her costar in Wind River, playing tracker Cory Lambert alongside her FBI agent Jane Banner.[8]

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Tom Hiddleston

They played Audrey and Hank Williams in the music biography I Saw the Light.[16]

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Kevin Feige

A producer of WandaVision, which follows Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff through changing eras of television comedy.[9]

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A useful detail

A question worth clearing up

Watch in context

Elizabeth Olsen in conversation with NPR’s Wild Card

Published by NPR / Wild Card with Rachel Martin. Watch on YouTube ↗