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    How Elizabeth Olsen Came Into Her Powers

    The actress started as an indie darling and never expected to become a Marvel linchpin as Wanda Maximoff. But she’s now so invested in the role, she’s open to a solo film.Elizabeth Olsen is used to waiting in the wings. When she was an acting student at New York University, she landed an understudy role in the Broadway play “Impressionism,” starring Jeremy Irons. The show ran for 56 performances. Olsen didn’t take the stage a single time.That sort of lost opportunity could mess with an actress’s mind, but Olsen was never in any hurry to seize the spotlight. Years later, when she was cast as the reality-bending witch Wanda Maximoff in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” her character was more of an ancillary Avenger than the main event, and in three subsequent Marvel films — each with a more overstuffed ensemble of superheroes than the last — Olsen never rose higher than 10th billing.But a funny thing happened after biding all of that time: “WandaVision,” a sitcom spoof about Wanda and her android husband, became an unexpected phenomenon when it made its debut early last year on Disney+. This month, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” which counts Olsen as its co-lead and pits her troubled witch against Benedict Cumberbatch’s goateed sorcerer, has proved even more major. The movie collected $185 million in its first three days of release, ranking 11th among the biggest domestic opening weekends of all time.For Olsen, who initially made her mark in independent films, this is the equivalent of turning a comic-book page to find yourself the subject of a massive splash panel. During a video call last week, I asked how it felt to come to the fore as a blockbuster leading lady.“I’m totally mortified!” she said. “I won’t watch it.”Hours after we spoke, Olsen would walk the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” but she planned to flee the theater as soon as the movie began. “This is pressure I’m feeling for the first time,” she explained. “I have a lot of anxiety with ‘Doctor Strange’ coming out because I’ve never really had to lead a commercial film by myself.”Olsen wanted to act since she was a child, but she was willing to wait after watching the experience of her sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley.Rosie Marks for The New York TimesShe coughed, unwrapping a foil package: “Sorry, I have a lozenge.”Olsen, 33, is casual and friendly, exuding a California glow so powerful that you would hardly know she had been sick for days. “It’s just annoying,” she said, swigging water from a Mason jar. “I think my body really wants to chill out.” She embarked on this global press tour the day after wrapping a seven-and-a-half-month shoot for the HBO limited series “Love and Death,” the sort of packed schedule that also required her to film “WandaVision” and “Doctor Strange” back to back.Because her “Doctor Strange” director, Sam Raimi, had not yet watched all of “WandaVision” when shooting began, it fell to Olsen to thread the tricky line through the two projects. In the Disney+ series, Wanda is so bereft after the death of her true love, Vision (Paul Bettany), that she invents an elaborate sitcom reality where he’s still alive, then adds two kids to complete the illusion. But in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” she takes a much harder turn: Corrupted by a demonic book of spells, Wanda breaks bad and throttles a cast of good guys while on a multiverse-spanning trip to find her children.Olsen “is scary not because of her destructive powers or her diabolical ambitions, but because she is so sad,” our critic A.O. Scott wrote. And if you still feel sympathetic to Wanda as she makes mincemeat of our heroes, it’s because of Olsen’s efforts to ground the character in something that feels specific and intimate. When Wanda issues a deadly threat, Olsen lets her voice go soft, and her eyes fill with tears and regret: There’s a real person in there. (Though other actresses in the supervillain realm tilt toward camp, Olsen understands that when you’re hovering in midair and wearing a red tiara, things are already arch enough.)But six Marvel projects in, is this the kind of big-screen career she expected? Not exactly.“It took me away from the physical ability to do certain jobs that I thought were more aligned with the things I enjoyed as an audience member,” Olsen said. “And this is me being the most honest.”Olsen in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” She had fullfilled her contractual obligations to Marvel in 2018 with “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “the power to choose to continue was important to me.”Marvel StudiosOLSEN HAD KNOWN she wanted to act since she was a child, but she also knew she didn’t want to act as a child. Any curiosity she might have had about fame was quieted by growing up alongside her sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley, who were cast in “Full House” before they were even a year old. The life-warping scrutiny of stardom could wait.Anyway, she felt far more comfortable in a group. Olsen played high school volleyball and sparked to the team’s camaraderie: Everyone could have their solo moment, but they had to work together to succeed. Even in college, when she started to audition for movies, she was in no rush to leave the theatrical ensemble she had come through school with.But film acting isn’t always as egalitarian. In 2011, Olsen stormed the Sundance Film Festival with a pair of star vehicles: “Silent House,” a single-take thriller that keeps its lens trained on her for 87 minutes, and “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” which cast her as an ex-cult member struggling to move on. That one-two punch led people to dub her the “it girl” of Park City, but as movers and shakers queued up in the snow to meet her, Olsen didn’t trust a thing they said.“It really felt like everyone was speaking through both sides of their mouth,” she said. “I was like, ‘This is a bubble.’ It felt like I was literally in a snow globe.”She came out of that experience knowing just two things: She didn’t want to be typecast as the crying indie girl, but she didn’t want to be thrust right into big-budget movies, either. “That looked scary to me, that kind of pressure,” she said.Still, sometimes it’s nice to be invited to the party. A few years into her acting career, after a streak of low-key indies, she asked her agent why she was never in the running for higher-profile movies. The reply: “People don’t think that you want to do them.”Did she? That’s a question Olsen had to ask herself then — and still does, from time to time. She decided she needed to put herself out there more, and signed on to a 2014 remake of “Godzilla,” reasoning that at least it was directed by Gareth Edwards, who until then had been an independent filmmaker.And then came the role of Wanda, and with her, entrée into Hollywood’s biggest franchise. As Olsen mulled Marvel’s offer to star in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” she listed the pros: It would defy her indie typecasting. She’d once again be part of an ensemble, albeit a superpowered one. And her “Godzilla” co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson was willing to come aboard as Wanda’s brother, Pietro, ensuring she wouldn’t go it alone. They signed on to “Ultron” as a pair.But Pietro was killed off at the end of that film, and as a shaken Wanda continued on through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wondering if she really fit in, Olsen pondered the same question. Because of her Marvel commitments, she had to turn down a starring role in the Yorgos Lanthimos dark comedy “The Lobster,” and it didn’t take a multiverse for Olsen to imagine how that film would have propelled her down an entirely different path as an actress.“I started to feel frustrated,” she said. “I had this job security but I was losing these pieces that I felt were more part of my being. And the further I got away from that, the less I became considered for it.” “WandaVision” wasn’t expected to be a major Disney+ series. Consequently, Olsen said, “there was no pressure, no fear. It was a really healthy experience.”Rosie Marks for The New York TimesHer initial contract with Marvel covered two starring roles and a cameo, though Marvel movies are so mammoth that the studio could have deemed the five weeks Olsen spent filming “Captain America: Civil War” a brief appearance. And while her rising profile helped get indie films like “Wind River” and “Ingrid Goes West” financed, she still wondered whether Wanda’s spell-casting was worth it in the end. Had she become typecast in a totally different way? And was it all building to something that mattered?Wanda was killed off at the end of “Avengers: Infinity War,” satisfying Olsen’s three-film contract. “The power to choose to continue was important to me,” she said. And around the time the Marvel Studios head, Kevin Feige, brought Olsen in to discuss a resurrection for “Avengers: Endgame,” he pitched “WandaVision” to her. At first, she wondered if it was a demotion: TV, really? But the more she wrapped her head around it, the more she realized it was her wildest screen opportunity yet.“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” was supposed to be Marvel’s first Disney+ series, an old-fashioned, down-the-middle action show in which the superheroes punch evildoers in every hourlong episode. “WandaVision,” by contrast, was a half-hour sitcom parody; the most significant fights of the show were marital squabbles, leavened by an eerie laugh track.“We thought what we were doing was so weird and didn’t know if we had an audience for it, so there was a freedom to it,” Olsen said. “There was no pressure, no fear. It was a really healthy experience.”But after the pandemic pushed Marvel to rejigger the order of its Disney+ series, “WandaVision” went first and became the unlikely standard-bearer. The show spawned countless memes, crashed the streaming service multiple times, and earned 23 Emmy nominations, including a best actress nod for Olsen.More important, “WandaVision” helped her fall in love with Wanda — a character she had played for years — for the very first time. The show offered a dizzying array of variations on the role — some sitcom-sparkly, others modern and morose — and the first episode, shot in front of a live audience, required all of Olsen’s theatrical training to succeed. She wasn’t sure it would resonate with a wider audience until friends sent her video clips of a Minneapolis brunch where drag queens had dressed as all of Wanda’s alter egos. “If you make it to that stage,” Olsen said with a laugh, “then you actually are part of culture.”Olsen admitted to feeling anxiety about “Doctor Strange”: “I’ve never really had to lead a commercial film by myself.”Rosie Marks for The New York TimesWith Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow out of the picture, Olsen is now the Marvel actress with the most hours clocked. Does she feel reinvigorated enough, after “WandaVision” and “Doctor Strange,” that she’d be willing to star in a solo film about her character?“I think I would,” she said. “But it really needs to be a good story. I think these films are best when it’s not about creating content, but about having a very strong point of view — not because you need to have a three-picture plan.”Now that she feels more comfortable in her signature role and in her own skin, Olsen wants to be more deliberate in her choice of roles and what she does with them. But she also told me a story from her understudy days about Jeremy Irons, who didn’t fully learn his lines until opening night of “Impressionism”; even through previews, he would muck around in front of the audience, exit the stage to peruse his pages, then come back on to muck some more. Maybe acting wasn’t something you trapped, pinned down and obsessively studied, Olsen realized then. Maybe you could embrace it as a fluid thing with an unknown destination.Olsen knows now that a Hollywood career can take turns that you never could have predicted, so you might as well enjoy where it goes. Over the weekend, she popped up on “Saturday Night Live” to support her co-star Benedict Cumberbatch; she played herself in the sketch, while the show’s Chloe Fineman played Olsen’s understudy. Sometimes, things happen to come full circle like that. Sometimes, it even feels like magic. More

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    Paula Vogel on ‘How I Learned to Drive’ Tony Nominations: ‘I’m Just Thrilled’

    The playwright Paula Vogel was first nominated for a Tony in 2017, for “Indecent.” Now she has a second Tony nomination for “How I Learned to Drive,” which she wrote in two weeks, 25 years ago. A play about abuse, love and survival, it interrogates the relationship between Uncle Peck and his underage niece, Li’l Bit.The actors who created the roles Off Broadway, Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse, have returned for the play’s Broadway debut, as has its director, Mark Brokaw. Both actors have been nominated, too. Speaking from her home in Wellfleet, Mass., Vogel said she planned to spend the day “doing all of my chores, so I can get on a train and come down to New York tomorrow, which will be exciting.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.So how does it feel?It’s more fun and lovely the second time around. This one feels like just a joint celebration with Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse and Mark Brokaw. I mean, we all came back 25 years later. So this is a real phenomenon to me. And I’m thrilled. I’m just thrilled.Why do you think it took this long for the show to come to Broadway?I mean, it’s interesting. Mary-Louise Parker was talking about The Village Voice. The cover was a photograph of that original production. And the headline said, “Too Tough for Uptown.” I remember seeing that and thinking, “That can’t be true.” We do tough things all the time on Broadway. I have to say that this season has made me so happy, with “Pass Over,” with “For Colored Girls.” It’s odd. I actually feel as if I’m home this season in a way that I never have before. I’m starting to accept that it took that much time for the play.And then of course the pandemic meant a further delay.I’m obstinate and stubborn. I held on. These actors have held on, Mark held on, we’ve all held on. We didn’t stop working even during the two years of Covid. We thought about it every day. We communicated our desire to each other every week. So it’s a miracle: that the entire community got through the two years and we’re back, that after 25 years this has transferred to Broadway.You wrote this play as a younger woman and at a time in which our culture was having fewer conversations about abuse. Would you write it the same way now?The difference between now and then is that I’ve grown comfortable with being a survivor. The play has been a gift to me in that it gets lighter every year. It gets farther away, that shore of adolescence and pain. It retreats in a certain way. Would I write it differently? I don’t think I would. There are certain plays in my life that have come out in two weeks. This is one of them. I sat down and didn’t stop. It was just straight from my heart. I don’t think those plays you rewrite.What is it like to watch the same extraordinary actors do the same roles 25 years later?The layers are incredible. You feel these actors processing every moment of their experience. And it makes it deeper and richer. I don’t have words to express how grateful I am to Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse. More

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    Tony Nomination Snubs and Surprises: Daniel Craig, ‘Funny Girl’ and ‘Paradise Square’

    Tony nominations morning is always filled with joy for lots of performers, theater artists and producers who find themselves in contention for Broadway’s biggest recognition. But there are also always some who are overlooked, and others who are just gobsmacked.Here are some of the snubs, surprises and observations about Monday’s list:The nominators spread out their admiration quite widely: Of the 34 eligible shows, 29 got at least one nod, including the critically scorned “Diana.” But five new plays were completely overlooked. Most surprising: “Pass Over,” the well-reviewed and bracing drama by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, and also the first play to open after the pandemic lockdown. Also scoring no nominations: “Birthday Candles,” by Noah Haidle; “Chicken & Biscuits,” by Douglas Lyons; “Is This a Room,” by Tina Satter; and “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” by Keenan Scott II.The Civil War-era musical “Paradise Square” has had an especially tortuous road to Broadway, and so far ticket sales have been quite weak. But the show’s fortunes on Monday had to offer comfort and hope: It snagged an impressive 10 nominations, tying for the second most of any show. Joaquina Kalukango was always a sure thing in the lead actress in a musical category, but nominators also singled out two of her supporting co-stars, Sidney DuPont and A.J. Shively. The show drew attention in most of the major technical categories as well, including for Bill T. Jones’s choreography, but one key member of the creative team was left out: the director, Moisés Kaufman.Several major stars who are drawing big crowds to their shows failed to impress. Among them: the married couple Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, who are starring in a smash revival of “Plaza Suite” that scored just one nomination, for costume design, and Daniel Craig, who is playing the title role in a revival of “Macbeth.” (His co-star, Ruth Negga, did get nominated, and the production was also nominated for lighting and sound design.)Tony nominators followed the critics, raining on the parade for the highly anticipated revival of “Funny Girl.” While it was the beloved musical’s first time back on Broadway in nearly 60 years, it scored only one nomination, for the tap-dancing supporting actor Jared Grimes. And Beanie Feldstein, who drew tepid notices filling Barbra Streisand’s shoes as Fanny Brice, did not receive a best actress nomination.How to handle the many ensemble-driven shows was always going to be a challenge for the nominators. In the case of “The Lehman Trilogy,” they bestowed riches on everyone, nominating all three lead actors — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester — and expanding the category to make room for them all. For the musical “Six,” on the other hand, a cast twice the size proved hard to rank, and none of the actresses playing the six wives of Henry VIII were crowned.That Jesse Tyler Ferguson would be nominated for his role in “Take Me Out” seemed a sure bet. And the suave star power of Jesse Williams, as the baseball demigod Darren Lemming, vaulted him to a nomination as well. But the big surprise was a third nod in the supporting actor category for the far less well-known Michael Oberholtzer, whose wounded ferocity as a racist teammate put him in (friendly?) competition with his co-stars.Another show also struggling at the box office — a revival of the choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” — also did quite well on Monday. The production had announced an early closing date of May 22, and must now decide whether its seven nominations, plus a social-media-fueled pay-it-forward campaign to get tickets into the hands of those who might not otherwise be able to afford them, are enough to extend the run. More

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    The coronavirus posed a special challenge to the Tony nominators.

    The pandemic has made this comeback theater season an unusually rocky one. After a joyous reopening following the long, painful shutdown, the Omicron surge led to a ton of holiday closings, and another spike in positive cases this spring led to a rolling wave of performer absences and occasional show cancellations.That disruption was upsetting for artists and fans, and damaging for producers and investors.It also posed an unprecedented complication for Tony nominators, who are not only required to see every eligible production, but also to see the performances of all Tony-eligible actors.That’s always hard — most of the nominators have day jobs, and some of them live outside New York, and many shows have limited runs. But this season, two factors made it even harder: a higher-than-normal number of shows opened in April, just before the deadline to be eligible for a Tony, and the spike in spring cases meant that key actors often missed performances. (Among the possible nominees who tested positive for the coronavirus near the season’s end: Daniel Craig, Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Laurence Fishburne and Ramin Karimloo. Plus: Billy Crystal canceled two performances of “Mr. Saturday Night,” citing the flu.)For nominators, that made the ordinary complexity of end-of-season scheduling far trickier — so difficult, in fact, that the Tony administrators wound up delaying the nominations by six days to give the nominators more time to see shows.Even so, the number of nominators who managed to get to the finish line is low. There are usually about 50 nominators per season, some of whom wind up recusing themselves when a conflict of interest develops; this season there were just 29 who were able to participate in the voting. More

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    The Tony nominations are being announced right now.

    As the theater industry continues its attempt to rebound after its lengthy pandemic shutdown, the industry this morning began its effort to celebrate the best work on Broadway by announcing a new set of Tony nominees.The first nods, to designers, are being followed by nominations for performers and shows.The nominations are being announced, on YouTube, by the actors Adrienne Warren and Joshua Henry.We have an updating list of all the nominees here.There are 34 eligible shows, all but one of which opened after theaters reopened. (The exception: “Girl From the North Country,” a musical that opened just before the shutdown.)The shows were all hoping to win nods in some of this year’s 26 competitive categories. Producers hope that nominations will lead not only to awards, but also to a bump in the box office, which has not recovered to prepandemic levels. And for artists, a nomination or a win can lead to more job opportunities and higher salaries.The nominees were chosen by a group of 29 nominators who saw all eligible shows and voted last Friday. Next, the 650 Tony voters have until June 10 to cast their ballots, and the Tony Awards will be announced on June 12. More

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    The Tony nominations are being announced this morning. Here’s how to watch.

    This year’s Tony Awards nominations, honoring work on Broadway as the industry tries to bounce back after the long coronavirus shutdown, are being announced at 9 a.m. Eastern today.The nominations will be announced by the actors Adrienne Warren (she won a Tony Award for portraying Tina Turner in “Tina”) and Joshua Henry (he’s a three-time Tony nominee, most recently for “Carousel”).We’ll have news and reaction throughout the day, and you can stream the announcement here.The Tony Awards, formally known as the Antoinette Perry Awards, honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway. They are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing.The nominations were determined by a committee of 29 people who saw all of the eligible shows and then voted on Friday by secret ballot. The nominators are not allowed to have a financial interest in any of the eligible shows.This is the first Tony Awards for which shows that opened after the start of the coronavirus pandemic will be considered — all but one of the eligible shows opened after theaters reopened following the lengthy pandemic shutdown. (The exception — “Girl From the North Country” — actually opened in 2020, but theaters shut down so soon afterward that not enough Tony voters were able to see it for it to be considered during last year’s awards ceremony.)This year there are 34 shows vying for awards in 26 categories; to be eligible, the shows had to have opened between Feb. 20, 2020, and May 4, 2022. (Last year, there was a delayed Tony Awards ceremony honoring shows that opened during the abbreviated 2019-2020 theater season.)This year’s awards ceremony will take place on June 12 at Radio City Music Hall; a three-hour performance-heavy segment will be broadcast on television by CBS, preceded by a one-hour awards-focused segment streamed on Paramount+. The ceremony will be hosted by Ariana DeBose, who earlier this year won an Academy Award for “West Side Story.” More

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    What’s playing on Broadway right now?

    From new shows like “MJ” and “A Strange Loop” to long-running Tony Award winners, our guide breaks down everything you need to navigate Broadway.Our guide offers an overview of the productions onstage now — including the bounty of comedies of all stripes this spring, from “POTUS” to “Plaza Suite” — along with some tips on planning your experience in a time of continued uncertainty, including how to buy tickets, for which refunds and exchanges are often possible, and navigating Covid-19 protocols. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES More

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    Most Broadway theaters have ended vaccination checks as coronavirus cases are rising.

    A man had his photo I.D. out and in his hand as walked up to the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Broadway to see “Come From Away,” but no one checked it. The families streaming in to see “The Lion King” were told to have their tickets out and their masks on, but there was no mention of vaccine cards. And the Covid safety officers in neon yellow vests who used to patrol outside “Six” were gone.Most Broadway theaters stopped checking the vaccination status of their patrons last week for the first time since they began to reopen last summer, easing safety protocols the same week rising coronavirus cases placed New York City into a higher risk level.The industry hopes that doing away with vaccine checks — which have also been eliminated at New York City restaurants, movie theaters and other venues — will make theatergoing more attractive, and that the remaining mask mandate will help keep audiences safe as cases have risen, but hospitalizations and deaths remain low.While some patrons welcomed the change, others said they felt uneasy about going into crowded theaters without the assurance that their seatmates were vaccinated, and several nonprofit Broadway theaters continue to require proof of vaccination.“I just don’t feel as safe as I have the past several months,” said Lauren Broyles, 44, an executive assistant from Hershey, Pa., who visited New York to see shows several times last winter but said she had stopped planning a summer theater trip after reading that Broadway dropped its vaccine mandate. “I’m waiting to hear what’s next.”But Michael Anderson, 48, of Hudson, N.Y., who was standing in line the other day to see “Hangmen,” said he thought that while vaccine checks had made sense earlier, he felt they were no longer necessary. “At this point, I’m vaccinated and boosted,” he said. More