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Elizabeth Olsen Reveals Why Scarlet Witch Has Dropped Her Accent in WandaVision

January 20, 2021 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas
WandaVision Elizabeth Olsen Image Credit: Marvel Studios

Elizabeth Olsen’s appearance in WandaVision has been missing Wanda’s accent, and she explained why in a new interview. The character is from the fictional country of Sokovia and displayed an accent during her first appearances in the MCU, but it is largely gone in the new Disney+ MCU series. Speaking with Collider, Olsen said that the accent is still there, but that it’s not being as heavily used in WandaVision for specific purposes.

“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,” Olsen said. “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.”

Joe and Anthony Russo previously discussed why Wanda’s accent was lessened in Infinity War and Endgame, saying, “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. Clearly Black Widow as a red head is an incredibly distinguishing characteristic for her, which is why she has blonde hair. Cap, we’ve seen Chris Evans walk around in public with a beard and no one recognizes him. There are simple things you can do to your appearance that take about 90% of your visibility away, and for us it was very intentional that we would just keep stripping that accent down to show her acclimating and hiding.”

WandaVision’s first two episodes are now on Disney+, with the next episode dropping on Friday.