She thought acting was ‘silly’, despite having A-list sisters. Her interests lay in dance, accountancy, agriculture, construction. Here she explains how she conquered her anxiety and embraced being a Hollywood star

The actor Elizabeth Olsen and I are in a London hotel, staring down at her dinner. She lifts the lid from one plate: a bowl of plain black beans. She lifts another: a bowl of similarly spare couscous. You wouldn’t know it, but Olsen is something of a foodie. She takes a set of knives around the world when filming, makes her own ricotta, knows what brand of caviar is best, and records the name of every restaurant she visits. She’s been engaged for years in an LA “croissant crawl” to find the best French pastry in the city, though she takes the hunt international every chance she gets. This past week she’s eaten a huge amount of red meat, she tells me, and developed high cholesterol as a result. Hence the simple grain and pulse dishes before her. Carefully she returns the lids. Then she says, “I am probably not going to eat while we talk.”

In person, Olsen, who is 35, manages the curious combination of being at once unnerving and disarming. Those wide eyes – so expressive and searching on screen – would be unsettling if it weren’t for her easy wit. It’s the eyes that Hollywood has latched on to: they have been deployed to reveal the trauma of an ex-cult member (her indie breakout Martha Marcy May Marlene), a wife in a loveless marriage driven to murder (Love & Death), a grieving widow (Sorry For Your Loss). As Wanda Maximoff, appearing in the Marvel films that have dominated her last decade, her eyes have been used to portray a virtual assault course of loss.