‘It’s not normal, but it’s all I know’

Actress Elizabeth Olsen tells Chris Harvey how she survived life as the little sister of the Nineties’ biggest child stars

Elizabeth Olsen is in Nashville. It’s green and wet, and she’s surrounded by nature. She flew in the day before – she has a few weeks off before returning to work on next year’s Avengers: Infinity War – and she was hoping to travel incognito. “No one else had my flight information, I didn’t hire a car, nothing. I got off at Nashville, and there’s one fan there who had pictures to sign, and I just said, ‘No, I’m not going to sign that.’ I think that’s creepy and I don’t think that behaviour should be rewarded. You must have to work really hard to get that information… that’s someone who’s a little bit stalkery to me.”

The 28-year-old actress has been dealing with that kind of attention all her life. As the younger sister of the Olsen twins, Ashley and Mary-Kate, now 31, who were television and film stars as children in the Nineties, Olsen recognises that her experience is out of the ordinary.

“It’s all I’ve ever known,” she says. “I understand that it’s not that normal to be worried about being photographed, when you’re growing up, by strange men around Los Angeles who are chasing you in cars. It made me despise those kinds of people, it made me despise gossip magazines.”

She doesn’t want to comment on Mary-Kate’s remarks, made in 2010, about not wishing her upbringing on anyone. Nor does she want to make a fuss about her own experience of diminished privacy – after all, she says, she’s found ways to deal with it: “When I was at the airport yesterday, one guy came up to me and said, ‘Has anyone ever told you, you’re the spitting image of Elizabeth Olsen?’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard that before,’ and that

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