Elizabeth Olsen says childhood with sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley was ‘pretty chaotic’

Elizabeth Olsen has reflected on growing up with with her older sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in the spotlight.

The actor, 36, said that she grew up going to television and movie sets as her twin siblings, now 39, became household names. Mary-Kate and Ashley played Michelle Tanner on the iconic sitcom Full House from 1987 to 1995, and went on to co-star in multiple movies before creating their luxury fashion brand The Row.

“I was the youngest of four, and we were all born within five years,” Elizabeth said in a recent interview with The Times about the siblings’ upbringing in Los Angeles, adding that it was “pretty chaotic.”

“So now I think the idea of a calm bath and bedtime story routine is so tender and sweet because we didn’t have anything like that,” she said. “I love being the friend or aunt who gets to come round and help with bedtime.”

Elizabeth went on to say that in addition to their own acting careers, her sisters were “forced to watch all my plays my whole life and go to my dance performances.”

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“We’re just a supportive family,” she told the outlet, adding: “It feels irrelevant to talk about it after 15 years of working.”

The WandaVision star, who co-stars alongside Callum Turner and Miles Teller in the new movie Eternity, occasionally shares rare glimpses of her relationship with her sisters, but the family mostly remains out of the public eye after Mary-Kate and Ashley stepped away from acting in 2012.

Echoing previous comments she has made about her family’s terrifying encounters with paparazzi while the twins were still minors, Elizabeth told The Times that she almost quit acting due to the scrutiny her sisters faced throughout their young stardom, along with the inherent pressure of being raised near Hollywood.

The actor said in 2021 that she even considering changing her name to Elizabeth Chase, her middle name, for her acting career when she was younger to avoid being associated with any nepotism from her sisters.

However, she went on to use her own name in credits for her breakout role as Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After first playing Maximoff in a post-credits scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014, she became an MCU staple, despite saying earlier this year that the superhero movies do not align with her personal taste.