Elizabeth Olsen Said ‘Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ is Uncomfortable to Watch
Elizabeth Olsen has been a fixture in the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever since her debut Avengers: Age of Ultron debut. And although she’s seen herself in plenty of Marvel films, it seems her last MCU feature might’ve left the actor squirming.
Elizabeth Olsen still hasn’t seen ‘Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness almost made $1 billion worldwide. Its high box office may mean that a lot of moviegoers saw the film, but Olsen wasn’t one of them. She once explained on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that she couldn’t watch the movie at the premiere after catching a cold. But after receiving a screener, Olsen still found herself unable to watch the film. It wasn’t because she had any qualms about seeing herself on the big screen the way some actors do.
“I’m one of those people who wants to study something, so I can figure out how to make it better,” she said.
Rather, Olsen didn’t have a good time with the Dr. Strange sequel because she enjoyed seeing movies in a more theatrical setting.
“I’ve seen scenes from it. It made me uncomfortable watching it,” she told Dazed Digital not too long ago. “If I’m going to watch something, I need to be alone, and I don’t really love watching things at my house. I like being in a theatre.”
The ‘Dr. Strange’ script kept changing on Elizabeth Olsen
For a while, Olsen thought Multiverse of Madness would morph into a different movie than the one she read in the script. The material kept changing so much for the Godzilla star that she grew tired of reading it.
“I mean, there were definitely moments where… there’s a point in making the movie where I just stopped reading drafts,” she once told Josh Horowitz regarding the constant script changes. “I was just like, ‘This is going to change again. Just keep me posted with the information I need and you guys fill in the blanks that you need. But I’ll just keep my lane…’ That one was a wild ride.”
But Olsen didn’t seem too frustrated by the fluctuating script, as she felt that was all a part of filmmaking.
“We always are changing, right? Because we’re always giving notes and they are very kind to welcome opinions and thoughts, and so it’s always an evolution even while you’re filming,” she said. “We definitely have a script, but when I was told I would be in it, I had no idea what it was gonna be. I just knew I was gonna be in Dr. Strange 2. And it wasn’t only until before we even went back to finish WandaVision during the pandemic that I found out what I am doing in Dr. Strange 2.”
Olsen was also a bit caught off guard that the writers for Multiverse of Madness had no clue about WandaVision.
“Well, I proposed that to the writers of Multiverse. I said, ‘do you know what we’re doing in WandaVision? Have you seen it?’ And no they had not seen it, because it wasn’t finished yet,” she remembered in an interview with Vanity Fair.
WandaVision was a deep exploration of Olsen’s Scarlet Witch and the grief that was consuming her. Meanwhile, many of Wanda’s questionable actions in Multiverse of Madness could be attributed to an evil artifact influencing the character’s emotions.
Because of this, Olsen had to find a way to bridge the gap between WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness using her own performance.
“I had to attack the same themes in order for it to be interesting for me, I think, and potentially for the audience,” she said “I just had to come at it from a different point of view.”
