It’s well established that Marvel’s anti-spoiler antics have led to a lot of confusion for its actors. They’ll be given partial scripts or even fake-out scenes, with layers and layers of secrecy and obfuscation. These security measures are so intense that MCU mainstay Elizabeth Olsen didn’t even know her character got “blipped” in Avengers: Infinity War. In a new interview with Variety, she shares that they were only allowed to read the script “in an office, with a security guard, on one specific iPad,” so instead, she opted for someone to just give her the bullet points of the plot.
“I mean, those movies I really don’t know what’s going on,” she admits. “I just get my pages, so I understand the part of the story I’m fulfilling. I get a story that is told to me from the Russos about what’s happening in the rest of the movie. And it isn’t in the script that everyone gets blipped.”
“I didn’t know I got blipped away until we shot it,” Olsen continues. “That was told to us that day. All of us went to the van where they had a bunch of equipment to show us pre-viz: Scarlett [Johansson], Chris [Hemsworth], Chadwick [Boseman], Sebastian [Stan]. We were all just in this van, and they said, ‘This is what’s happening. You guys will disappear.’ And we’re like, ‘OK.’ It was shocking. I mean, we didn’t know. We thought the movie ended differently.”
In fact, Olsen didn’t really know “anything went on past” Vision’s (Paul Bettany) death sequence. “[It’s] very embarrassing shooting those kinds of things, because, like, the world depends on you doing it,” she explains, “Because you’re like — [holds out her hand]. Ugh, I’m doing this in public. But you have one hand out that’s stopping something with energy. And then you’ve got another hand that’s extracting this fake thing from this dotted face. And it’s painful and emotional.”
The strange dichotomy can be summed up thusly: “These movies are very silly, but you have to act your ass off for them to work.” Olsen elaborates, “It’s just silly. There’s a lot of silly stuff. I always wish that one day they just release a version of the film without any special effects, because then you understand how ridiculous it feels. And how spectacular the work is that goes into making these.”
That spectacular work, by the way, includes fully adding in an actor after the fact, as in Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. Olsen went viral earlier this year for claiming she had never met John Krasinski, one of her co-stars on the film; “But I also had never met John Krasinski. I wasn’t lying!” She reveals. “We filmed it separately. I was with the stand in. I don’t even know if they’d figured out he was doing it.” “Silly” is certainly one way to describe this kind of piecemeal filmmaking!