One Nightstand With Elizabeth Olsen

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at The Blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Actor Elizabeth Olsen is firmly off Instagram, but that doesn’t mean she’s not tempted. “There’s part of me that wishes I could have one that I can curate and it all be just amazing things that I want to look at — art and recipes and philosophical quotes,” she says. But she has the same fear the rest of us do: doomscrolling. “I don’t actually have, as much as I think I do, the self-regulation to not receive any of the other stuff that I don’t want to actually be around.”

Luckily for Olsen, she is too busy to get sucked in. After a decade portraying Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch in the Marvel cinematic universe, the 36-year-old has been carefully selecting thoughtful projects that capture her attention. Her most recent choice, A24’s romantic comedy Eternity, sees her opposite Miles Teller and Callum Turner in a who-will-she-pick love triangle set in the afterlife. “David Freyne, the filmmaker and co-writer, created this reflection of what we’ve become as a society — this obsessive consumerism of, ‘The best thing is around the corner, there is perfection,’” she says. “The fact that you die and you think you’re going to meet your creator, and what you see is just more consumerism. I think it’s a funny nihilistic backdrop for telling a story about ordinary love and the simplicity of that.”

Outside of filmmaking, Olsen has been cultivating her reading habits. “I’m a people pleaser and I really wanted my teachers to feel valued and I felt like I could do that by caring about what we were doing in school,” she says of her early tastes, which at that point hewed more closely to the syllabus. “I became very competitive with my grades when I was in junior high and high school and so that was more about required reading,” she adds. “As an adult I probably read one or two books a year until the last six years. It’s still a new love that I find really fulfilling.”

Discover four of her favorite reads below.

Playwright Brian Watkins recommended her first book, When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. “It was strangely what I was reading when I was filming Eternity,” she says. “I’m just kind of endlessly curious and amazed by where we are today as a society and civilization and how much has been invented and what the human brain has been able to come up with.”

The book weaves together fact and fiction as it takes account of some of the greatest scientific inventions of the last 150 years and the strain that the innovation put on its creators. “Madness and human persistence are both themes that I adore,” she says, adding that the book scratched a childhood itch for more scientific understanding. “When I was a senior, I took AP Chemistry, and then the next stage would be quantum physics, and I didn’t get that far,” she says. “But I loved science and I loved mathematics. I don’t really have any other parts of my life where I get to go back to that basic school education… I didn’t have to do that at NYU either. So it felt like a treat in that way.”

She read her second choice, The Possibility of An Island by Michel Houellebecq, about three summers ago while filming her 2024 sci-fi thriller Assessment. “Fleur Fortuné was the director, and she kind of rolled her eyes when I told her I was reading Michel Houellebecq,” she says, laughing. “I love reading Houellebecq. The first book of his I read was Elementary Particles.”

The 2005 book splits its time between the modern day and a future civilization where humans have been ravaged by nuclear war and climate change and replaced by sterile “neo-human” clones. It reminds Olsen of how AI has become so much more prevalent in our everyday lives. “It did predict the future in a really wild way because now these tech oligarchs, a lot of them are transhumanists, and they do believe that we as a humanity could better ourselves by putting [in] chips or that we can choose to live longer if we choose to become transhumanists,” she says.

She adds: “I also like the idea of the main character being a comedian. Because in a world that starts to silence people, often we go after comedians because they’re the ones who are satirizing and reflecting back at us. And that is what this character is doing and getting in trouble for. And so there were multiple levels why I appreciated this book at that time.”

Her third book is a modern cult classic: All Fours by Miranda July. “I read First Bad Man in 2020 and I was already a fan of Miranda’s work,” she says. “I’m quite linear in how I think. I just think of her as being not linear — very abstract [and] obsessive — and so I’ve always loved her films because of that. But reading First Bad Man, I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is my favorite art form of hers, and she can do so much.’”

She was similarly enamored when she read All Fours. “I loved it so much,” she says. “There is just so much liberation that you feel reading it. It’s like every intrusive thought you’ve ever had… She’s not just saying it, she’s fully exploring it. She’s just got the spotlight on it.”

Olsen was also drawn to July’s humor. “She’s the writer that I laugh out loud reading the most,” she says. “I laughed out loud a lot during Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead’s book, but this I laugh consistently out loud — constantly.”

Olsen read her final selection, Circe by Madeline Miller, while in Marvel prep. “I was reading it right before I did Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness where my character similarly is sent to a place where she has to hide her own power and she’s a witch. So there was something in it that I really loved.”

The book also tapped into a childhood passion for the classics, which she developed after reading the Iliad in Junior High. “It really just opened up something that I fell in love with,” she says. “Then in college, you really focus on Greek tragedies and you read poetics.” A trip to Rome while working in London in her early twenties cemented her love. “Ancient-anything blows my mind.”

Miller’s writing also hooked her. “Her prose, especially when you’re contrasting it to a classic text, pulls you in and welcomes you without dumbing it down,” she says. “It’s really rooted in every other tale that she’s able to combine. You feel the history and the knowledge she has of all of the ways we've come to this point… You just feel for this woman who’s treated so terribly that she’s sent into isolation because of her power.”

Watch the full interview below and on Spotify.