Marvel’s The Avengers: Age of Ultron hits theaters THIS WEEK (May 1st) and there’s LOTS of excitement. Two of the new characters in this movie are “the twins” – Pietro Maximoff (Quicksilver) and Wanda Maximoff (Scarlet Witch), played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth “Lizzy” Olsen! We had the pleasure of sitting down with them during the #AvengersEvent press tour to learn more!
Given that they were new to the cast, we were all curious about their feelings on that! So, this question was asked, “You said that when you came onto the set with you guys working together before that made it easy, but what was it like coming out to the set with the established?
Aaron: Yeah, that was kind of the initial thing of like oh god everybody knows, this is like their fourth or fifth movie playing these characters. They’re pretty comfortable in that kind of situation and with each other and just understand the whole kind of the mechanics of it; ‘cause, you know, this movie is such a machine. It just keeps going and going and you know you’re a small piece to the rubrik’s cube… you’ve seen the quality of movies they’ve done before so you know you can have trust, but it’s just you don’t quite understand. It feels slightly daunting but it sort of very quickly becomes like a very kind of family environment…you know, they’ve set up over the years, and very comfortable with one another so it feels, you’ll be meeting them all over, relaxed and chill and the way they are here is the way they were on set. It’s just a lot of fun and once you have a laugh with that then you know it’s kind of cool and you can kind of think about what you’re doing rather than kind of observing like ‘wow, this is pretty f-ing cool and overwhelming and surreal’. It’s kind of crazy but yeah, it was good.
With Lizzy it’s just like our characters are kind of combined so I can kind of rely on her and vice versa I think so. In those sort of situations it’s just like we kind of feel slightly uncomfortable around the Avengers anyway, you know, so early on that we’re kind of outsiders anyway. So I think it also kind of played within it, you know, what I mean?
Elizabeth: Yeah
Going into the movie, I knew nothing about these new characters outside of what you see in the trailers. And, love them or hate them (or maybe both?!), they sure are integral to the story this time! And from a character standpoint they are intriguing as they have powers that none of the Avengers possess. So it was fun hearing them explain how they brought those powers “to life” on the screen! 
Question for Aaron about Quicksilver: “You did a lot of running. Obviously some of it’s special effects, but did you have to really do a lot of running?”
Yeah. That was pretty much what I did all day long. If in doubt, run. All the special effects are sped up. We’d shoot the scene… if Lizzy was in the scene I’d run up to her and we’d shoot that. We did the dialogue, then we’d do a plate afterwards where she’d step out and I’d do the run up and then they would speed that up. But even though you wouldn’t really know because it goes so quick, all the running where there’s a blur… it was me behind it.
Question for Lizzy about the Scarlet Witch: Since basically all of your powers are special effects, how was it for you to act out those parts where you’re just kind of staring?
Elizabeth: Well, you know what it’s actually really fun because a lot of people have stunt doubles and my stuff is like a dance, kind of, and I can’t have a stunt double come in and do that. I was always doing everything whereas, you know, I even had to do like a triple flip back kick situation but I always got to be in control over my characters body movements which was cool and it was fun because there’s no blueprint to how Scarlet Witch moves ‘cause you just see these like awesome finger, hand gestures and these circular red things.
I worked with a movement coach and she and I watched Joss’s version of Scarlet Witch. That was really enjoyable to watch because he would do the motions and we would interpret it into our own thing, but it was really fun. It was really fun to work with the dancer on something like that and it adds a different visual element to the fighting. And it also felt a little funny because you’re not making contact with anything–like literally zero contact. So, you just trust that you’re going to put a robot where my eyes are looking. There’s a lot of trust that goes in when you have special effects that I wasn’t used to and then after seeing the movie I thought ‘aha, now I’m comfortable’.
It was so fun interviewing these actors to learn more about the movie & their characters! For more Avengers fun, be sure to check out all my other Age of Ultron cast interviews…
- Thor & Captain America Interview
- Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver Interview
- Hawkeye & Maria Hill Interview
- Director Joss Whedon
- Producer Kevin Feige
Make plans to go see Avengers: Age of Ultron which hits theaters on May 1st!
Disclosure: Disney hosted me in LA in order to attend the film screenings and to participate in group interviews & media events. As always, all opinions, experiences, and love of Disney are entirely my own! All photos above are courtesy of Disney/Marvel and MomStart.com.
