Gareth Edwards' Godzilla 'Shocked' Elizabeth Olsen In An Emotional Way
Hey, did you forget that Elizabeth Olsen was in the 2014 "Godzilla" reboot? It's okay if you did — she has a somewhat thankless role, playing the wife of the film's main (human) character, Mr. Boring (not his real name), portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Olsen's character spends most of the film on her own or hanging out with her son (Carson Bolde). When she's not doing that, she's standing in the rain and looking up at Godzilla with a shocked face. To be clear: Olsen is fine in the role, she just doesn't have a whole lot to do.
The nature of spending most of the film removed from a majority of the action ended up having an emotional impact on Olsen when she finally got to see "Godzilla." In Olsen's own words, she was "shocked" by some of the film's emotional beats, and there's a good chance she wouldn't have felt that way if she had been present during the filming of the scenes in question.
In one way, Olsen was like us, the general audience, seeing everything for the first time.
Elizabeth Olsen was moved by Godzilla's emotional moments
While speaking with Den of Geek, Olsen opened up about how emotional parts of "Godzilla" ultimately made her. "I was actually shocked that I wanted to cry like twice in the film," Olsen admitted. The actress was particularly taken with an early scene between Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche, where Binoche's character ends up dying in front of Cranston's eyes. Olsen said:
"I think that shocked me. I never really worked with anyone except Carson [Bolde] who played my son and Aaron, very briefly—and this other actress Jill [Teed] who played one of the nurses—and so, it's just nice to see what everyone else is doing. There's a part of me that thought I should have seen what everyone else was doing...But it's good that I didn't, because I'm not seeing everything they're seeing. I'm seeing it from a very different perspective, and it's just eye-opening to see what everyone else did."
I'm sure Olsen's fans probably wished she had a little more to do in the movie, but at the very least, she got to experience the emotional beats fresh. And she's right: the scene between Cranston and Binoche is surprisingly emotionally, especially for a big monster movie.