WandaVision Star Elizabeth Olsen: Is She Racist For Calling Wanda A Gypsy?

Goodness strikes Maybe once, maybe twice And it all comes down to you

"But even among you, poor sons of nature, there is no happiness! Tormenting dreams live under your bedraggled tents"

~ from the poem ‘The Gypsies’ by Alexander Pushkin

“I was so excited! We have a Halloween episode and they were trying to figure out how big of a nod to the character we were going to do and it did start off with the classic Scarlet Witch costume. It was kind of like a gypsy thing that has to wear a headband and I, like, fought for it. I was like ‘No, we have to go full into it…this is like the greatest thing, if Paul’s doing it, I’m doing it.”

~Elizabeth Olsen, on her WandaVision costume pictured below

The above quotation apparently contains a “slur.” If you read various pieces online about it, not only does it contain a slur against Roma people, Disney is problematic for casting a white woman instead of an actor who is actually Roma in the role of Wanda Maximoff. “I hope the writers allow Wanda Maximoff to be a Roma woman, even if they didn’t get an actress who was,” the Mary Sue piece I link to above concludes, tossing in that final kidney punch moments after praising Olsen’s acting chops. This is nothing new. These concerns were brought up long ago, when Olsen was first cast as Scarlett Witch.

Two things.

Thing One

First of all, I cannot accept the notion that characters—either live-action or animated—absolutely must be played by actors who are the same nationality, gender, age or sexual orientation. At what point do we draw the line?

If an actor is blond, are they forbidden from playing a brunette? If the actor is from England are they forbidden from playing an American? At some point we lose the thread and become so tangled up in our vision of social justice we forget basic concepts such as the definition of acting. To play a part that is not you. I am not offended when I see a woman cast in the role of Hamlet. I don’t think that all Simpsons characters should be voiced by actors of the same heritage—where will they find all the yellow people, after all?

So no, I don’t think you need to cast a Roma actor in the role of Wanda or Pietro Maximoff and, as many have pointed out, plenty of Roma would pass as white. If Disney had cast Elizabeth Olsen as Shuri from Black Panther we’d have a problem, because there’s clearly no way Olsen could or should play a Wakandan (without some serious explanation, at least).

Clearly there is a line we draw in the sand and maybe it differs from one person to the next. I have my opinions on the matter. White people should not put on black face to play black people (except for when it’s clearly parody). Movies should stop whitewashing Asian roles by casting white people in them, though the definition of whitewashing can be misapplied at times. (Frankly I’m still trying to figure out anime and JRPGs, which frequently present characters as white and blond and blue-eyed despite being Japanese, but that’s another story and probably a rabbit hole I shouldn’t go down just now).

Anyways…

Like so many issues this is neither black nor white. Maybe it’s for the best that production companies are more sensitive to these issues. I think it’s better than simply being callous. And certainly it’s more authentic when you can cast a Native American in a Native American role or a Hispanic person in a Hispanic role and so forth, and I think in modern Hollywood that’s been largely the case. Less so when we leave race outside the picture, but then I think we enter into different waters. Surely a gay actor can play a straight character; a straight woman can play a lesbian and so forth.

Overcorrection, I believe, is a very real thing even when intentions are pure, and if only very specific types of people can play very specific types of roles, we risk not casting the right actors for the job. The most important thing is telling a good story and to do that effectively you need great writers and actors and directors and all the rest. You need that more than simply casting very, very specific types of people. I’m sure there are some fantastic Roma actors. I’m not sure if any of them could pull off Wanda Maximoff in WandaVision as well as Elizabeth Olsen. She is simply perfect in the role. And I think you can also have a black man play Batman or James Bond or a black woman cast as Spider-Man or whatever you want to do with superheroes. Go wild.

So that’s Point Number One.

Thing Two

Now we come to the word “gypsy” itself and the online effort to cast Olsen as racist for using it. Olsen, wisely, has abandoned social media and can (hopefully) ignore the Twitter Brigade. But it’s an interesting subject so I’d like to talk about it.

A couple examples from Twitter so you get the drift.

kurt loves comic wanda @det3ctivelucas

no one is trying to cancel ur fav. We just want her to wake tf up and apologize for being racist and ignorant. Elizabeth Olsen hun wake tf up.

We see this in some hot takes and, of course, among the Twitter Brigade. “Gypsy” we have learned in recent years is considered by some to be a racist slur against the Roma people.

rosi | illustrator 👑 @optyck

cw: slurs 2015 Elizabeth Olsen was calling Wanda slurs. 2015 Elizabeth Olsen had been told it was a slur. So why was she calling her slurs like RECENTLY while doing press for WandaVision? Because she's a nasty racist.

Again, while I do think we should always try to be sensitive to other cultures, calling someone in the United States racist for using the word gypsy is pretty ridiculous. Maybe that word has another connotation, a darker subtext, in Europe—though not everyone would agree—but in America it basically means “hippy.” It’s a romanticized word that conjures up beautiful, mysterious travelers roaming about the wild countryside, flowers in their hair and bells on their fingers. We imagine dancing around fires and colorful, comfortable clothes and men playing lutes and women singing.

Go to any American city and you’ll find any number of small businesses called Gypsy Something Or Other. The Gypsy Café, the Gypsy Clothing Emporium, the Gypsy Boutique. Seriously google “Gypsy” with any sort of business and you’ll find it, and each one of them is paying homage to an idealized, romanticized version of a colorful, magical nomadic people and none of them are in any way attempting to denigrate the Roma people. Interestingly enough, I’d say most Americans don’t even associate the term “gypped” as in “I was gypped” with the word gypsy. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s the impression I get.

There is the risk, of course, that we stumble into the realm of the “noble savage” and over-idealize the Roma or our fictionalized notions of gypsies in the process, much like people often do with Native Americans, or even the Sámi people who I think were given the same treatment in Frozen 2. But clearly this is not the same thing as being a “nasty racist.” Imagining that the American Indians were all peaceful and at one with nature may be inaccurate and naïve, but it’s not in the same ballpark as thinking they’re subhuman. The poem I quote at the top of this piece by Alexander Pushkin is actually a critique of this very notion, arguing that these idealized notions about the Roma back in the 1800s are absurd, that they have their own problems just like everyone else.

I don’t have all the answers. I never do. Nobody does, not the wise nor the boisterous.

As an American I find it preposterous to think that the use of the word gypsy is racist. For my entire life it’s meant something beautiful and I think many Americans feel the same way. But at the same time, if it really is so harmful and offensive to Roma people then I’m fine retiring it. It’s weird when people who are not Roma get outraged over it, but I think a generally good policy in life is doing our best not to offend unless we have a good reason to.

Perhaps it would be a better thing to have the word transformed into something that means what we all thought it meant rather than banishing it from the lexicon, but maybe that’s not so easily accomplished. Words do change and definitions with them. But they’re not caterpillars, either. Nothing so elegant as metamorphosis for language.

Recently, rock icon Stevie Nicks was thrust back into the spotlight when that cranberry juice skateboarding dude made a viral TikTok featuring the Fleetwood Mac song ‘Dreams.’

Is Stevie Nicks—who described herself in a recent NPR interview as a “freewheeling, roller-skating witch that I am”—a racist for her song ‘Gypsy?’ Do the lyrics strike you as a slanderous assault on the Roma people? No more than Olsen’s excited discussion of her cool “Gypsy” costume. Context matters. So does empathy. Either one without the other and we risk falling prey to the whims of outrage and offense and, yes, of being an asshole for no reason, too.

So we’re gonna get #CancelFleetwoodMac trending on Twitter or what?

A version of this post also appeared at VOICE where I’ve started writing. It’s a really cool new startup and I’d love it if you followed me there as well. If you sign up, you can support my writing there without spending a penny. Thanks!