PARK CITY, UTAH — Huddled in a snow flurry on Main Street, a clutch of autograph seekers are waiting on the sidewalk for stars when a swarm of paparazzi buzzes into action. Lit up by their flashes, a leggy young thing in leather trousers is being hustled into an SUV.
One of the fans wants to know something. Um, who is she?
“I’m Elizabeth!” says a sparkling Elizabeth Olsen, in what will surely be one of the last times she has to explain who she is to the public.
Olsen, the 21-year-old little sister of the 24-year-old Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley, was christened the Sundance Film Festival’s It Girl on the strength of her work in two movies, which do not yet have release dates: the chilling suspense film “Martha Marcy May Marlene” and the horror feature “Silent House,” a movie shot in a single take.
“Elizabeth Olsen Steals Sundance” ran an AOL headline.
V Magazine dubbed her “New Ingenue” of 2011.
“Elizabeth Olsen pulls off a pretty amazing transformation” in “Martha Marcy,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter in a rave review.
Observers compared her self-assured and meticulous performance with that of Jennifer Lawrence, who emerged from nowhere at last year’s Sundance to land an Oscar nomination for “Winter’s Bone.” In “Silent House,” meanwhile, Olsen meets the challenge of being on-screen throughout while descending into madness. “It actually made me physically sick because it was very exhausting to keep the momentum of the fear and terror in one shot,” she told THR.
Olsen, whose friends call her Lizzie, was the darling of a press conference Saturday afternoon, where she laughed easily and came across as friendly and welcoming. The contrast with Kristen Stewart — who slouched and mumbled her way through Sundance last year after arriving with two serious movies that fizzled — could not have been clearer.
Olsen has been training in acting since age 7, but says she purposely “waited until I felt a little bit more accomplished and comfortable as a person” before making her move. (Her actual first movie, apart from minor roles in her sisters’ pictures, is “Peace, Love & Misunderstanding,” in which she plays a teen staying with her hippie grandmother (Jane Fonda) in Woodstock. It’s not finished yet.
Olsen also worked on Broadway, where she was an understudy on the play “Impressionism” last year and won over the crew with her warmth. Fellow actors were impressed when she memorized the entire text, not just her part. Last January she began doing movie auditions.
Too easy? Olsen even denies she feels under pressure to succeed.
“That pressure,” she said, “I think is fictitious. It’s made up by people I don’t come into contact with. It’s not my everyday life. I have a great relationship with my family, and I love talking about them.”
Olsen laughed when she talked about shooting “Martha Marcy” in the Catskills last summer. “My dad [David] asked if he could come and visit the set one day and I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what we’ll be shooting today . . .’ And he said, ‘Liz. Is there nudity?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ So he said, ‘Is this [visit] a good idea?’ And I said, ‘No. It isn’t.’ ”
Olsen grew up in LA, where “my parents would pick me up from elementary school and my sisters would be at the set [filming a TV series], so my after-school care was hanging out there,” she told THR.
“They would be like, ‘Hey Lizzie, you want to be on this one?’ I would be like, ‘OK!,’ and then they would put gum in my hair.” Now that she has signed up for her next movie, a thriller with Robert De Niro, Olsen appears to be taking time off from her drama classes at NYU’s Tisch School, where classmates say she wears only nondescript outfits. Some say she buried the fact that she is the third Olsen sister — even as Mary-Kate and Ashley were launching a clothing line with Intermix named Elizabeth and James, for her and her brother, who is 26.
Lizzie kept a photo of her and her big sisters in her dorm room, but it was among so many other pictures of family and friends that nobody noticed, sources said. It didn’t get out that she was their sister until her second semester, when a photo of her appeared in a tabloid walking with Mary-Kate, followed by a photo in Teen Vogue.
Now the tabloids and fashion rags are onto her. Olsen says she’s ready. “Film always frightened me and was scary,” she told Cinema Blend. “. . . now I feel like a strong enough person to not have a fear of that.” — Additional reporting by Faran Krentcil