Elizabeth Olsen stars in Love & Death: Candy and Pat Montgomery true crime drama

The set of true crime drama Love & Death was intense for Elizabeth Olsen, as she reveals why one of her co-stars wanted to push the boundaries of their physically demanding scenes.

As Wanda/the Scarlet Witch in the blockbuster Marvel films and series, Elizabeth Olsen conjures up a comic-book character and brings her to life. Now, in the new true-crime drama Love & Death, she is portraying housewife-turned-killer Candy Montgomery. But Olsen isn’t the most recent actor to interpret the part – Jessica Biel did so in 2022’s Candy – and when similar projects are released around the same time, comparisons are to be expected. Olsen, for one, tells The Binge Guide she’s eager to check out the competition: “I’m very curious where we cross over and where we differ.”

When she prepares to play Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch, in the Marvel universe, actor Elizabeth Olsen is used to her fair share of choreographed fight training. But for her role as Candy Montgomery – the perky housewife who axe murders her friend Betty Gore (Lily Rabe) – in the new HBO series Love & Death, Olsen tried to temper her killer instincts.

“Lily was seven months pregnant,” Olsen explains to The Binge Guide of her reluctance to get too physical with Rabe, despite her co-star’s insistence that they play out their combative scene with gusto.

“I was so frustrated. I kept saying, ‘I don’t feel comfortable doing that, Lily – I understand you want me to really push you or hit you, but I am not doing it!’ There was a lot of negotiation.”

The result is Olsen’s multidimensional portrayal of Montgomery, the young woman in a small, religious Texas town accused of committing the shocking 1980 slaying after allegedly being confronted by Gore about her affair with Gore’s husband, Allan (played by Jesse Plemons).

Elizabeth Olsen: ‘I freaked out and got cold feet. It’s not ideal when you are telling a story.’ Picture: Jake Giles Netter/HBO Max

Although Olsen, a true-crime buff, was excited to bring the intriguing case to life and to work with co-executive producers Nicole Kidman and David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies, The Undoing), the twisted tale had already inspired articles, true-crime documentaries, the 1984 book Evidence Of Love, and a 1990 telemovie by the same name starring Barbara Hershey.

After agreeing to star in Love & Death, Olsen then discovered that another fresh interpretation of Montgomery’s story was in the pipeline.

“I freaked out and got cold feet. It’s not ideal when you are telling a story,” she says of Jessica Biel’s rival series, Candy, which debuted last year.

“But then you make peace with it … There’s such a myriad of ways to tell the same story that are equally creative. So, you just have to be confident in the version you are participating in.”

This isn’t the first time that projects about the same subject have hit screens around the same time.

Two mid-2000s movies about the writer Truman Capote – Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Infamous starring Toby Jones – were in cinemas within a year of each other.

Remarkably, Jones faced the same scenario when he played filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock in the 2012 TV movie The Girl just as Anthony Hopkins was starring in the biopic Hitchcock.

When it happens, comparisons are inevitable. That is why Olsen has avoided seeing Candy – for now.

“I just need our show to be out and then I look forward to checking it out,” she says.

“I think Jessica Biel is such a fabulous actress, and Melanie Lynskey and Pablo Schreiber [who play Betty and Allan] are, too. They have such an incredible cast. So, I would love to watch it. And I heard the performances were great and I’m very curious where we cross over and where we differ.”

While Love & Death leans into a bit of black comedy, Olsen remains mindful of the sensitivities around playing a real person.

“What makes it specifically hard is the generations that have been affected by this event,” she says.

“And while we’re trying to tell an entertaining story – and sometimes that means using humour – we don’t want to be disrespectful.”

Love & Death is streaming from Thursday on Binge.