Elizabeth Olsen calls green screen work “playing make-believe”

Elizabeth Olsen has had to do a lot in her time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Pretending that she has chaos magic coming out of her hands all the time cannot be easy. But she got candid about green screen work and how it is “dumb” but also hard.

Olsen has had a lot of different kind of CGI work in the MCU. With WandaVision, the brilliance of the practical elements of the show is what made it stand out. There were still those CGI battles and the moments where we knew the actors were not actually doing the thing we were watching. It has all, in turn, made me wonder about what that experience is like for actors.

You have to believe you have these powers because you have to sell it to the audience. If you think that you’re just a woman standing and moving your hands around, that’s what we see. But Olsen made a great point about how green screen works and how she has to kind of approach a character like Wanda Maximoff.

“You really have to embrace this dumb point of view, where you feel like a 7-year-old playing make-believe,” the actor told The Hollywood Reporter during press for her new movie, His Three Daughters. “I do believe that at some point they should release a full version of one of the movies, without any of the special effects so people can see how hard it is.”

Fans would love a non-CGI cut

We have seen fans hope for non-CGI cuts of things in the past. The success of a campaign like the one we witnessed with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes shows that there is interest out there for it. Imagine a Marvel movie like this. Mark Ruffalo is just yelling in his CGI outfit and Tom Holland is jumping on top of things in the same suit.

It isn’t necessarily that we want to laugh at the imagery of it. Instead, it feels like we are seeing magic happen. Like Olsen said, they have to essentially play make-believe to make these scenes work. So we’re watching actors really create magic out of nothing.

Maybe it is my love of theatre or my own background in it that makes that fun for me. I love when an actor has to look at an empty space in front of them and imagine an entire world we cannot see. It is made even better when I see that actor really believe it themselves.

So yes, green screen acting is really “dumb” as Olsen said but she’s also right that you have to lean into those moments of pretending like we used to as kids. To see that unfold and watch as actors create something powerful out of nothing? That’s what makes movies and television so special to me. I’d love a CGI-free version of a Marvel movie just to see the difference between the two. But also I’d watch Olsen read a newspaper if it meant seeing her perform.