Elizabeth Olsen Felt Her Love Scenes With Josh Brolin Were Weird Because of His Daughter
Elizabeth Olsen and veteran actor Josh Brolin collaborated on more projects than The Avengers franchise. While doing another, more intimate feature, Brolin and Olsen were scripted to do a love scene. But Brolin’s daughter might have made that sequence particularly hard on him.
Elizabeth Olsen once commented on doing love scenes with a much older Josh Brolin
Olsen and Brolin both once co-starred in the Spike Lee project Oldboy. She confided that she pursued the movie after reading the script. Olsen remembered having a terrifying reaction to the story that stuck with her.
“When I read the script, I was so freaked out and disturbed and heartbroken,” Olsen once told Daily News. “There’s no moral compass to the film.”
Filmmaker Lee was also a huge motivator for Olsen to do the film. She shared that Lee was the most collaborative director she’d worked with at the time. So when she prepared for her love scene with Brolin, Lee made sure that Olsen was comfortable with the sequence.
“We were already like a family with the crew and Spike. It wasn’t something that was beaten around the bush,” Olsen once told Wenn (via Contact Music). “In our first meeting Spike said, ‘What are we doing about that?’ I’m like, ‘Ok, I guess we’re talking about this now, which makes it easier’. He just wanted to know what I’m cool with and what I’m not cool with. What would be off limits is showing [my genitals]… but apparently everything else was a go. That’s all he wanted to know.”
This might’ve been why Olsen felt little discomfort about her love scene. But she theorized that Brolin had the opposite reaction.
“It was probably weirder for him than for me because he has a daughter my age, so I’m sure that was weird for both of them,” she said.
Elizabeth Olsen shared she only shot nude scenes in films she believed in
Oldboy required Olsen to undress herself in front of the camera. Although appearing nude on screen is something some actors scoff at, Olsen hasn’t minded having to do so. It helped that Olsen looked up to her fellow contemporaries who were also familiar with nude scenes.
“I remember watching Holy Smoke and thinking that it was so reassuring to see a young Kate [Winslet] doing something that was so bold in so many ways,” Olsen once explained to Porter (via She Knows). “I thought to myself, ‘OK, so it doesn’t destroy your career if you appear nude or take risks,’ because not everyone in my family and group of friends thought it was the best idea to be naked in a movie.”
Still, Olsen wouldn’t take the same liberties with every film she was in.
“I truly believe in the films I’ve chosen to be nude [in]. It helps tell a more grotesque story,” she said. “There’s nothing gratuitous about it, and it creates the opposite of pleasure. I find it empowering.”
Elizabeth Olsen once revealed this ‘Oldboy’ scene took a while to get over
Although Olsen had little qualms with the film’s love scenes, there were other parts of the film that left a mark on the Love and Death star. Speaking to fellow actor Emma Brown on Interview Magazine, Olsen referred to a take in the film where she was attacked. The sequence stayed with Olsen longer than she realized.
“I haven’t thought about it in a while because, in hindsight, you make jokes about it and you get funny stories from it. When I was talking about it earlier today, I started to realize that it took a couple days probably to get over. Even if you can laugh about it, it’s still the physical things that your body has to go through, it’s pretty insane,” she said.
