Elizabeth Olsen Once Shared She Was Intimidated by Jeremy Renner in ‘Age of Ultron’
Elizabeth Olsen teamed up with Jeremy Renner for the first time in Avengers: Age of Ultron. But it might have taken some time for the two to warm up to each other because of Renner’s personality.
Jeremy Renner wasn’t ‘overly friendly’ to Elizabeth Olsen when they first met
Renner was already a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe when Olsen was recruited for the superhero series. Olsen made her debut in the franchise in an after-credits cameo in Captain America The Winter Soldier. But her official run as Scarlet Witch started in Avengers Age of Ultron. The scale of the project hit Olsen while doing the movie, however, and she began second-guessing her place in the superhero team-up film.
Her first scene with Renner didn’t help her nerves. In a 2017 interview with Vulture, she confided that her co-star might have accidentally made them worse.
“I was intimidated by him because of his dryness and because he doesn’t sugarcoat things,” she said. “He’s not overly friendly.”
Because of everything going on, Olsen also grew anxious with her performance as Scarlet Witch.
“My character had these powers I was trying to figure out for the first time,” Olsen said. “And I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’”
But Renner ended up being the one who helped Olsen relax a bit more into her new role.
“I asked him, ‘This is really overwhelming — what do you even focus on?’ And he started talking about his character’s family, and how that roots him into something tangible,” she remembered. “That’s exactly what you should be doing, and I should have already known that before starting: that you need to find something tangible in these moments of chaos.”
How Elizabeth Olsen felt working alongside Jeremy Renner in a non-superhero movie
Olsen and Renner were used to working with each other as partners in the MCU. In addition to Age of Ultron, they collaborated on Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame. But Wind River was a much smaller picture featuring the two where they weren’t playing superheroes. Instead, Wind River saw Olsen and Renner playing members of Law enforcement investigating a brutal murder that took place on an Indian Reservation.
Olsen was drawn to the movie partially because she was going to play a character she didn’t expect to be. And she doubted others would’ve expected, either.
“It’s an opportunity to play a part that I would never foresee myself having written for me, to be able to just develop more skill,” Olsen once told Collider. “It’s kind of a terrifying thing to approach because there is a part of you that has to believe that you have the confidence or the ability to not distract an audience into believing that you are capable of being this, to having this profession.”
Wind River and her Marvel films couldn’t have been any more different. But Olsen found that acting with Renner in the thriller wasn’t too much unlike working with him on a Marvel set.
“Oddly enough, working with Jeremy in those worlds it’s kind of the same … You end up talking about the same things but you have more time or something like—to, obviously, you explore characters, differently,” she said. “You have the story that you’re presenting to an audience is richer with character and backstory and history as opposed to trying to really quickly get in character so you can get into the next fight scene with.”
Jeremy Renner once revealed he and Elizabeth Olsen are practically neighbors
Renner and Olsen are also pretty close in real life in terms of actual distance.
“She’s like my neighbor,” Renner once told ET. “She lives around the corner from me, so I see her all the time.”
Because of this, Renner quipped he didn’t have to worry about not seeing Olsen when they both weren’t doing Avengers movies.
