“I felt very clear about how I was going to navigate lots of things because of watching them.”

Donato Sardella

Elizabeth Olsen has been making a name for herself as an actor for over a decade, but it wasn’t always easy.

The younger sister of The Row designers and former child actors Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Elizabeth says she’s learned a lot about the entertainment industry after watching her sisters experience trauma at the hands of the media.

In a recent cover interview with Harper’s Bazar U.K., Elizabeth discussed her loving relationship with her sisters and why she’s protective of her privacy. “I felt very clear about how I was going to navigate lots of things because of watching them,” she said. “I don’t think of living my life as a public person, I just think of living my life, and then I have this job.”

Donato Sardella
While the actor technically got her start in a cameo role in one of her sisters’ TV movies, the youngest Olsen sibling’s first leading role was in the 2011 thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene. Since then, she’s starred in numerous award-winning films and TV series, even earning an Emmy nomination in 2021 for her role as Wanda Maximoff in the popular Disney+ series WandaVision.

Of course, there’s a certain amount of pressure when you come from a famous family. “I’ve always felt that presence, which made me work harder and maybe have a chip on my shoulder, to be overprepared and disciplined, so I could feel like I was earning it,” she says.

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During her undergraduate career at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, she always pushed herself to be the best. She says, “That feeling definitely settled five years into working, but I had this need to be the hardest working student when I was in school.”

Earlier this year the Ingrid Goes West actor responded to a snide question from a paparazzo regarding her older sisters. “How come you’re so much nicer than your sisters?” he asked. Olsen responded, “Because you guys have been bothering them their whole lives.”

Olsen has been very vocal in the past about the toll the media took on her sisters and how she resents the paparazzi. “They would follow us shopping and [Mary-Kate and Ashley] would almost get into car accidents because of the paparazzi, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. I just thought, ‘💭This is such bullshit,” she said in her 2011 Nylon cover interview. I mean…she’s not wrong!