I like Elizabeth Olsen and I think you would too. She’s movie star-beautiful – all fine-boned features and enormous green eyes – but she laughs like a cartoon hyena and you get the sense she finds all the Hollywood hoo-hah just a bit silly.
Today, she’s in a room at a fancy hotel in central London; a tiny figure in a grey wool suit and black knee-high boots, hemmed in on all sides by cameras, studio lights and cables. “I’ve got quinoa on my teeth,” she says by way of greeting.

The 36-year-old actor is promoting a new film called Eternity. It’s a high-concept romcom set in the afterlife that blends camp humour and pratfalls with the sadness of people trying to make sense of their lives. The film’s Irish director, David Freyne, has said he was inspired by the 1960 Billy Wilder classic The Apartment, a high-water mark for movies seeking to be both funny and profound.

Olsen plays Joan, an elderly woman who succumbs to cancer and finds herself in The Junction, a clearing house for souls that’s part airport terminal, part job fair. Joan has the body of a woman in her early 30s because the dead revert to the age they were when they were happiest. Each newly arrived soul is assigned an “afterlife coordinator” whose job is to help them decide which eternity to choose (the myriad options range from Ice Cream World and Smoker’s World to Paris World and Queer World) and the one person they’ll spend it with.

Larry (Miles Teller), Joan’s husband of 65 years, is already at The Junction, having choked on a pretzel at a family gathering. He’s desperate to be reunited with his wife and assumes she’ll feel the same way. But there’s a hitch. Luke (Callum Turner), Joan’s first husband, a chisel-jawed dreamboat who was killed in the Korean War before they had a chance to build a life together, is also awaiting her arrival. Faced with an impossible choice, Joan spins like a top as her dead husbands compete for her affection and the chance to be at her side for the rest of time.

Eternity is something of a tonal gear shift for Olsen, whose “indie queen” reputation is built on playing complex, morally ambivalent characters. She first came to notice in 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, a drama that cast her as a damaged young woman escaping a sinister cult. The film was the breakout hit at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, and for the first time people started talking about Elizabeth Olsen instead of her older sisters, Mary-Kate and Ashley, aka “The Olsen Twins”.

More recently, Olsen has played a vapid influencer (Ingrid Goes West), Hank Williams’ wife (I Saw The Light) and a rookie FBI agent (Wind River). She was a woman yearning for a child in the sci-fi thriller The Assessment and her portrayal of real-life Texas axe murderer Candy Montgomery in the 2023 miniseries Love & Death earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

Even Wanda Maximoff, the levitating, reality-warping sorcerer she plays in all those Marvel movies (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, et al), is nuanced; a complicated mixture of hero and villain. It’s testament to her acting chops that Olsen scored an Emmy nomination for her performance as Wanda in WandaVision, Marvel’s first foray into television.

The heavy demands of Marvel movies – she spent most of 2019 to 2022 in front of green screens – means she’s scrupulous about other roles. “They [Marvel movies] are fun in lots of ways because I love the people I work with, I get to live in London and I get financial independence. It’s fun to be strapped into a harness and pretend you can fly. There’s something silly, goofy, and childlike about that. I don’t like adrenaline rushes or rollercoasters, but I love getting to do those kinds of stunts. I just want to make sure it’s not all I’m considered for.”

Eternity, she says, felt like a perfect next step. Written by former White House speechwriter Pat Cunnane, it was voted onto Hollywood’s Black List of most-liked unproduced screenplays in 2022. “To me it felt like a timeless film, a film that already existed,” she says. “Sometimes I read scripts that feel that way, not because they’re total ripoffs, but because they contain elements of older films with a contemporary twist. I loved the idea of the afterlife being bureaucratic and consumerist. It was a nice reflection of what our actual gods are in Western culture.”

Playing Joan, an old woman who finds herself in a much younger body, was a challenge she relished. She researched the cultural references of a woman who would have been in her prime in the 1950s and gave her an upstate New York accent. “When you get old you have a different vocal texture where the sound is in the back of your throat,” she says. “And I had some fun with some postural things that would occur when you realise you no longer have aches and pains.”

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While promoting Eternity in America, Olsen was asked for her own vision of the afterlife, surprising everyone with her answer. She said she expected to die alone in a coastal town in England that was “foggy and wet and kind of cold”. Her final resting place would have “one bakery, one coffee shop, one fishmonger, one cheese shop, one community centre and one theatre”. The peculiar specificity of her vision provoked hilarity in the UK, with one newspaper compiling a list of dank seaside towns that might satisfy her requirements.

Olsen is quite aware of the ridicule but takes it on the chin. “I really love living in England and I love the coast,” she says. “It’s something I think about often. I’ve worked here quite a bit and for long chunks of time.”

If she had to choose a partner for perpetuity, she’d opt for her husband, musician Robbie Arnett. She and Arnett, a member of the American indie pop trio Milo Greene, eloped in 2019. “I love cohabitating with my husband,” she says. “Even during COVID, it just worked. We would have designated days when we weren’t allowed to ask each other a single question. And truly, there’s no one else in my life that I could tolerate for that long.”

Olsen and Arnett have written a series of children’s books together about a cat called Hattie Harmony. She’s a “worry detective” who finds ways to assuage anxiety in others and herself. Olsen describes herself as a “fear-based person who has a sense of humour about it”. In her 20s she suffered months of crippling panic attacks.

“Being a control freak, it took me by surprise because I’d never had anxiety as a kid,” she says. “It was a big part of my life for six months because chronic panic attacks are terrible. I never spoke about it when it was happening because it was so terrifying. You also think no one will hire you if they think you have a medical issue. But it’s not something that rules my life now.”

Arnett, she adds, suffered anxiety attacks as a child and still does.

I ask her about the late Diane Keaton, an actor she cites as an important role model both professionally and personally. She was 14 when she first saw Annie Hall and was beguiled by Keaton’s performance as a kooky actor with an androgynous sartorial style. “I loved her humour, her beauty, her neurosis. She was just so unique to me and so alive.”

Her fascination with Keaton took her down a Woody Allen “rabbit hole” from which she has yet to emerge. “I’m still discovering films of his I’ve never seen,” she enthuses. “I just saw Stardust Memories for the first time. It’s as beautiful as [Ingmar] Bergman.”

I remind her that many of her peers have distanced themselves from the American director and his work, but she doesn’t blink. “You cannot erase that [Stardust Memories], it exists. I love how he analyses human behaviour in such an intelligent way and so humorously without punching down. Those films are important to me.”

Cinema itself is also important to her. She has said she won’t make a studio picture unless it has a theatrical release. “I just care about places where people gather and have something in common regardless of life experiences or politics or things like that,” she says. “That’s also why I like sports like baseball.”

No one understands baseball outside of America, I tell her. The games go on for hours.
“They can,” she says. “And it’s so riveting. I don’t understand cricket, but I feel like some people don’t find that boring at all. And they’re related, right? Like, they’re also hitting something with a bat and there are bases.”

Not exactly. But there’s no time to explain the finer points of cricket. Olsen is off to discuss the afterlife with someone else.

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Eternity opens in cinemas on December 4.

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