If you were to ask Elizabeth Olsen, she would say she’s not an actress who is keen on method dressing. In fact, I know she would say that because she literally did say it, recently revealing in an interview that she method dressed with co-star Aubrey Plaza years before Zendaya and her stylist Law Roach made the trend cool.
In a recent interview, Olsen was going through her purse to explain a bunch of items. It’s a YouTube bit that is pretty much known for being staged, but this time it was even more obvious given Olsen pulled out a giant photograph of herself and Aubrey Plaza wearing matching clothes. I mean, I guess there’s always a chance she’s just lugging around a 5X7 of herself and her former co-star, but I’d be a little worried about the actress, if true.
Anyway, the going through one’s bag trick is great as a conversational starter point for talking about Olsen’s career, and having the picture handy was probably nice for reminiscing, as well. The moment in question went viral in 2017, and it’s rare for two actresses to show up wearing the same outfit (though not unheard of as Alexandra Daddario and Brie Larson wore the same dress to an event more recently).
In this case, Olsen and Plaza’s look-alike stint was 100% staged, as she recently admitted:
She and I were doing press for a movie we did together called Ingrid goes West about influencers. However, when we made that movie, influencers – there wasn’t a word for it. It was a very small movie that we made for a million dollars, and we were trying to figure out how to get press for it. So, we wore the same dress to our premiere and pretended that it was an accident.
If you’ve actually seen Ingrid Goes West, the concept makes total sense. In the movie, Aubrey Plaza plays a character who is stalking Elizabeth Olsen’s own character. But Olsen admitted it was more to get press than to start any sort of “on theme” method dressing trend, telling In Style in the video it was before the advent of the popular method dressing trend.
It seems like people now, you know, dress on theme, for their project or something like that. Which is great for people who are good at that, and this was like the thing that made the most sense because she’s my stalker in the film. It worked out.
Ingrid Goes West came out in 2017, the same year Zendaya, who notable started the method dressing trend, starred in Spider-Man: Homecoming and The Greatest Showman. It’s also the year that Zendaya really started method dressing with her partner Law Roach, as she wore a ringmaster-inspired outfit for that movie, later following up that triumph with a C-3PO space-looking Dune outfit and, of course, a slew of tennis-inspired looks for Challengers.
Method dressing has become far more popular on recent red carpets, as Olsen herself alluded to in her interview, and Megan Fox recently wore a bloodied corset to harken toward an alternate universe where Jennifer from Jennifer’s Body made it out alive. It’s led to some real-life trends like Barbiecore and more, and I hope that celebrities keep it up — even if it isn’t totally Elizabeth Olsen’s cup of tea.
