Elizabeth Olsen talks Scarlet Witch losing her accent from Age of Ultron

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

If you go back to Elizabeth Olsen's introduction into the MCU as Wanda Maximoff aka Scarlet Witch in 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, her character had a pretty thick Sokovia accent. You may also notice that across her various appearances in the MCU, that accent has essentially disappeared on her road to her latest appearance in Disney+'s WandaVision. It wouldn't be the first time an actress donned an accent in a superhero film only to drop it by the sequel (Halle Berry's Storm in X-Men) but Elizabeth Olsen is offering up an explanation as to why the accent was ultimately dropped but she insists that it's still there.

"The Sokovia accent was created by me and Aaron and our dialect coach because it's a fake country and we could find different sources of Slavic sounds. And 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. [Laughs] So 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."

It looks like Olsen is saying that she didn't simply stop doing the Sokovian accent because it was too difficult but she instead made a conscious decision to put on a more American accent in subsequent films. I would need to watch Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War again but I don't remember it being a gradual drop and more like they just abandoned it completely after Age of Ultron. It also makes sense that she wouldn't use it on WandaVision since the series is a play on classic American sitcoms. The Russo Brothers have addressed in the past why her accent slipped in Captain: American Civil War and they seemed to have their own reasons for it:

"We have intentionally tried to strip that accent away for a couple of reasons. 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. So if you're gonna try to disguise yourself or hide yourself or not be caught, you're going to try to limit those trigger warnings that would make it easy for someone to identify you, which would be inclusive of her accent."

Do YOU think that's the reason Elizabeth Olsen dropped the Sokovia accent?