Elizabeth Olsen has a surprising beef with the Marvel Cinematic Universe: She doesn’t understand why they keep making her do her own stunts. While on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” to promote her new HBO Max drama, “Love and Death,” Olsen had a lot to say about how odd it is that Marvel keeps ignoring her stunt double’s “better” performance in favor of her own.
“We’ve had so much technology growth through these movies, and they just chose to use me for every stunt in [‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’]. I didn’t understand,” Olsen told the CBS host. When pressed by Colbert, she quickly clarified, “I didn’t do all of them, but I did most of them, which is a waste of everyone’s time because the stunt double does it so much better.”
To highlight her point, Olsen recalled a stunt she had to do for “Multiverse of Madness” that required her to drop from 30 feet and land in a specific way. “I kept landing like Peter Pan, like sort of fencing,” Olsen said. “I was like, ‘Just use the double. This is so ridiculous.’ There’s a double for a reason, like face replace — they do it all the time. And they used it. In the movie I’m landing, and I look like Peter Pan.”
That’s not the only behind-the-scenes Marvel scoop Olsen offered Colbert. After he praised her performance in Disney+’s “WandaVision,” Olsen spilled on how she and her co-star Paul Bettany felt out of place while they were filming it.
“Paul kept calling us the forgotten cousin to the Marvel universe. He just felt like we were some annoying cousin that people just threw in the corner,” Olsen said. “Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan were traveling all over the world and blowing things up, and Paul and I were just doing sitcom acting in a corner.”
Olsen may not fully understand how she fits into the MCU, but whatever she’s been doing, it’s working. To date, the actor has appeared in five Marvel movies in addition to the aforementioned “WandaVision,” which earned her both an Emmy and a Golden Globe nomination. She’s also set to appear in the upcoming season of Disney+’s “What If…?” and has teased that she may be returning for “Agatha: Coven of Chaos.”
Watch Olsen lament about stunt work in the “Late Show” segment above.