I think most people would generally agree that moms are awesome, and there would likely be a similarly large crowd that would agree that moms aren't always perfect. Case in point: Elizabeth Olsen's mom has apparently been keeping up with Disney+'s theory-inspiring WandaVision, which is the awesome part, but she recently confessed that she'd been calling Olsen's heroine Scarlet Witch by the wrong name for all the years since Wanda Maximoff was first introduced. D'oh!
Appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to promote WandaVision's highly anticipated season (and likely series) finale, Elizabeth Olsen laughed along with Jimmy Fallon over reactionary memes that MCU fans created for Episode 8. That installment ended with Kathryn Hahn's Agatha Harkness calling Wanda "the Scarlet Witch," marking the first time that moniker has been used within the Marvel live-action projects. It was indeed Agatha's final words that clued the actress' mom Jarnie Olsen in on the fact that she'd spent years referring to her daughter's character erroneously. Here's how Olsen put it in the episode:
My mom just told me the other day that she’s been calling me the Red Witch for the last – she said four years, but I think I’ve been doing this for like six or seven. And she just learned that I was called the Scarlet Witch last week.
Now, to give Jarnie Olsen some credit here, it's been long overdue for the MCU to officially turn Wanda into the actual Scarlet Witch, though I can understand why the concept for WandaVision may have caused Marvel's creative teams to hold off on introducing the title. (Even though they probably didn't know how the show would handle Wanda's origin story when previous filmed were produced.) So without that name being stated a dozen times a project like other characters such as Iron Man, Spider-Man or Captain America, it's not a total mystery how one could be mistaken about such things. At least she knew enough to stick with a scarlet-esque hue, as opposed to guessing something completely different like Chartreuse Witch or Burnt Sienna Witch.
Elizabeth Olsen continued, sharing that she wasn't even fully aware that her mom's mistakes were truly authentic.
She was like, ‘Why didn’t you ever correct me?’ And I just told her, ‘Because I didn’t know you were just incorrect. I just thought you were making a joke.' I was like, ‘I didn’t know that’s what you thought my name was.’
Such a polite one, that Elizabeth Olsen. The Olsen twins really did her dirty with that diss song back in the day.
You gotta love how moms are probably the only people who could make such a glaring mistake and have little issue with sharing it immediately. Not to keep generalizing things, but there are likely far more dads who would have realized that particular mistake and just never brought it up again. The same for best friends and siblings, probably. That said, one has to wonder how many times Jarnie Olsen said "Red Witch" in front of her daughter without it being obvious that she was plainly wrong about it.
For a quick pick-me-up, check out the Tonight Show segment below, which features a WandaVision-esque trip through various eras of talk shows.
Everybody should make a point of waking their own moms up when WandaVision's finale hits Disney+ early Friday morning, at least if you want to be called every name under the sun that isn't your own.
