In "Eternity," Elizabeth Olsen (left) stars as a woman who dies and reunites with both her first (Callum Turner, right) and second (Miles Teller, center) husbands in the afterlife.
After her death, Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) reunites with Larry (Miles Teller), her husband of 65 years, in the afterlife in "Eternity."
After dying and going to the afterlife, Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) finds her first husband Luke (Callum Turner), who died in the Korean War, has spent decades waiting for her.

Some people fear getting old, but for Elizabeth Olsen, it's always been something to look forward to.

Since she was in high school, the "Avengers" star, 36, has been excited about the idea of being elderly one day. Olsen, who in the romantic comedy "Eternity" (in theaters Nov. 26) plays a woman in her sunset years, attributes her "fantasy of growing old" to the fact that she grew up largely without grandparents.

"I knew one grandparent growing up. The other three passed before I was born," she says. "So I don't see growing old as a given. I think of it as such a privilege."

Getting old is "something I've always looked forward to, and maybe in a weird way, because I just thought it was something that was so foreign to me and exotic."

Olsen gets a preview of what that will be like in "Eternity" by starring as Joan, a woman who has been married to her husband, Larry (Miles Teller), for 65 years when they die one after the other and wake up in a kind of purgatory where they look young again. There, the deceased are tasked with deciding where to spend the rest of eternity − and who to spend it with.

But Joan finds herself in a heart-wrenching predicament when she is reunited with both Larry and her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), who died in the Korean War and has been waiting for her for the past 67 years. She is now forced to choose which of the men she will spend the rest of her afterlife with.

Olsen, who has been married to musician Robbie Arnett since 2019, sees the film as a celebration of how "special the simplest and most ordinary relationships can be," including her own.

"I really did relate to the two of them," she says of Joan and Larry. "It was almost like a fantasy I got to live out, that (my husband and I) got to grow old together."

In particular, Olsen related to the married couple's loving bickering, the kind of lighthearted arguments between people who know each other's eccentricities so deeply. "That kind of bickering's fun!" she says. "It's playful and it's sweet."

But the role of an old woman with the appearance of a woman in her 30s may not have been too much of a stretch for Olsen, who jokes she already feels "out of fashion" and much older than she really is. Case in point: the fact that she has had to be warned about how young people text.

"I've stopped putting periods at the end of all my sentences recently because someone told me that it was very aggressive, and that's not how I mean to come across," she says, laughing.

"Eternity" marks the latest in a series of projects from Olsen that have dealt heavily with death, from "Sorry for Your Loss" and "WandaVision," TV shows in which she played women grieving their partners, to "His Three Daughters," a Netflix film in which her character is preparing for her dad's death. Though Olsen says this throughline in her work is accidental, she thinks "a lot" about mortality and has a "fear of death because I don't want to die young."

"I don't think about an afterlife," she says. "I think that's why I really don't like the idea of dying. I would be comforted if I had a belief in something else, but I don't. I've been curious, but I can't quite believe in it."

But Olsen found it moving to see her character in "Eternity" being unafraid to die because she's satisfied with the full life she has lived. "I hope to get to that point in my life," she says.

"Eternity" is also the latest smaller movie for an actress who has spent much of her career starring in some of the biggest movies ever made, playing Wanda Maximoff throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2015's "Avengers: Age of Ultron."

Wanda hasn't appeared in live action since her supposed death in 2022's "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," and Olsen notes she needed a break after her "life was Marvel" for three consecutive years between "WandaVision" and the "Doctor Strange" sequel.

"I was ready for a pause," she says. "It felt nice to step away and get other characters in my body."

No plans to bring Wanda back to the MCU have been confirmed, and Olsen maintains she's "absolutely not in the loop" about what Marvel is cooking up these days, other than what Paul Bettany has told her about his upcoming "WandaVision" follow-up series, "VisionQuest." But she feels energized about the idea of picking up Wanda's crown once again.

"Now I miss her," Olsen says. "If I get the opportunity to go back, I actually feel like I filled up on something. You start taking from the same well for a long time, and you need to live some life to be able to bring something new to the character.

"I don't really know what that would be, but I feel like I've experienced some other elements of life that would make me really excited to jump back in. I hope I have the opportunity to."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why Elizabeth Olsen has 'always looked forward' to growing old

Reporting by Brendan Morrow, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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