Elizabeth Olsen Explains Scarlet Witch’s Changing Accent, from ‘Age of Ultron’ to ‘WandaVision’
Zack Sharf
Elizabeth Olsen‘s Scarlet Witch accent has been a topic of discussion for Marvel fans ever since the actress made her MCU debut in 2015’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” Olsen sported a thick accent from the fictional country of Sokovia in “Age of Ultron,” but the accent had seemingly disappeared by the time of “Avengers: Infinity War.” Now Olsen and Scarlet Witch are at the center of the Disney+ television series “WandaVision,” where the character appears in American sitcom genres with a perfect American accent. Olsen explained Scarlet Witch’s ever-changing accent in a recent interview with Collider.
“The Sokovia accent was created by me and Aaron [Taylor-Johnson] and our dialect coach because it’s a fake country and we could find different sources of Slavic sounds,” Olsen said. “We wanted to make sure it didn’t sound Russian because Black Widow speaks Russian, and so we just needed to sound more like Slovakian. So we created these sound changes that worked for Aaron’s British accent going to Slovakia basically and my American accent so that we sounded related. And then all of a sudden, all these different characters had to speak it in different films.”
Olsen continued, “The Sokovian accent took a lot of time. It hasn’t gone anywhere. There have been reasons for everything. It lightened up when she started living in the States, and in ‘WandaVision’ she is playing the role of being in an American sitcom and so it’s not gone. It is absolutely still there.”
Joe and Anthony Russo, who directed Olsen in two “Avengers” movies and “Captain America: Civil War,” previously said Scarlet Witch’s vanishing accent was an intentional creative choice. As the filmmaking duo said back in 2018, “One is you’ll notice at the beginning of ‘Civil War’ that Black Widow is training her to be a spy, and two is she’s been on the run, and one of the most distinguishing characteristics that she has is her accent.”
Perhaps as “WandaVision” continues and the spell of the American sitcom breaks, MCU fans will get to hear Scarlet Witch return to her traditional Sokovian accent. The nine-episode Disney+ series airs new episodes each Friday.
