For over a decade, Elizabeth Olsen has been doing all sorts of wild things for Marvel movies, including stunts. In an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she talked about what it is like doing these stunts, which heavily include wirework to make it look like that you’re flying (seen below).
The feeling Elizabeth Olsen had when she first started doing stunts became an issue in filming. She talked about laughing when she flew up in the air, ruining the take of some intense fight. The best way to describe it for people who have never had that opportunity was to compare it to “a roller coaster ride.”
“Because your stomach leaves you. It’s like, I guess, the joy people get on roller coasters, which I don’t get.”
Elizabeth Olsen has new feelings about doing her Marvel stunts
Over the years, Elizabeth Olsen has had time to get used to her stunts; the wires flinging her in the air and other methods that Hollywood uses to make it look like an actor is flying have changed since she has done multiple Marvel Avengers movies, co-led a show, and was the baddie in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Now, she has “recovered” from her “giddiness” of being hoisted up as she blasts bad guys (and sometimes students at the Kamar-Taj). While she has gotten better, some more intense scenes can be daunting, like one in a 30-foot drop in Multiverse of Madness. She even wanted a stunt double (Katelyn Brooke) to do it for her. In the final edit, it was the Avengers star dropping and then landing.
“I definitely recovered from my giddiness. Sometimes I am just like, ‘Okay, how many more of these do you want? I can do this all day’ kind of thing. Sometimes I get a little freaked out. There is one in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness where I had to be dropped from 30 feet up and land, and they wanted to drop me pretty quickly so that it looks like it had an impact, but I kept landing like Peter Pan.”
Actors never do all of their own stunts, even if they say so (as James Gunn once pointed out). The WandaVision star said she did a lot of them but said that”the stunt double does it so much better.”