If we had a penny for every time Elizabeth Olsen played a widow trying to navigate her grief in a fantastical setting in the last five years… Well, we'd have two pennies. After playing a grieving Scarlet Witch in WandaVision on Disney Plus (and again in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), Olsen is tackling love and loss again in new rom-com Eternity.
She plays Joan, a woman faced with an impossible choice in the afterlife, but Olsen tells GamesRadar+ that she didn't "consciously think of" any similarities between the two characters when we sit down with her and Teller in London to discuss the movie. "I also don't even mean to pick projects that are about grief, and I did all of them for different reasons," she says.
"With His Three Daughters, it was my friend Azezal Jacobs who directed it," she continues, referring to her 2024 Netflix drama about three estranged sisters reuniting to care for their dying father. "He was kind of trying to prepare himself for his parents' passing, because they were getting quite old, and it was almost like an emotional preparation for him, and I loved getting to work on that with him, with Natasha [Lyonne] and Carrie [Coon]. With this, it felt more about a continued life as opposed to just grief."
That's because in the world of Eternity, life doesn't stop when you die. Instead, you have one week to choose where you want to spend the afterlife – and there are no takebacks or do-overs once you decide. Olsen's character Joan has a big decision to make, then, when she realizes it's not just Larry (Miles Teller), her husband of 60 years, waiting for her beyond the grave: Luke (Callum Turner), her first love who died in the Korean war in the very early days of their marriage, wants to spend his afterlife with her too. It poses an impossible dilemma for Joan, as well as bringing back long-buried feelings of grief for the life she could have had with Luke.
"There's such an emphasis on, 'Where do you want to go, which eternity do you want to choose?' And at the end, really, it's about, 'But who do you want to spend it with?'" Teller adds. "And I think that's beautiful."
Eternity is out now in US theaters and arrives in UK cinemas on December 5. In the meantime, check out our guide to the other upcoming movies on the way in 2025 and beyond.
