Elizabeth Olsen’s nightmares about being ‘shot and killed’ in US influenced decision to move to UK

‘The immediate moment I stepped outside and had a coffee, I’m just calmed,’ actor says about being in London

Elizabeth Olsen has revealed how her nightmares have encouraged her to leave the United States and move to the United Kingdom.

In an interview with The Guardian published on September 29, the 35-year-old actor opened up about living in a rural northern California town with her husband, Robbie Arnett. Speaking to the outlet, she confessed that she’s concerned about the amount of gun violence in America, prompting her to have some terrifying dreams.

“I’ve died in a lot of dreams. I’ve been shot in the head and killed,” Olsen said.  “And it’s like, now I have cold blood rushing down my head, and it’s darkness.”

She admitted that she’s considered moving to the UK, since she and her husband enjoyed living in London while filming her 2022 Marvel movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The actor also recalled how happy she felt during a recent visit to the city.

“I got in [to central London] last night,” she said. “And this morning, the immediate moment I stepped outside and had a coffee, I’m just calmed.”

Although she acknowledged that there will be safety concerns everywhere she goes, she emphasized that she feels at peace in London.

Elizabeth Olsen and husband Robbie Arnett (Getty Images)

“We’re always worried about random acts of violence in the United States without even really processing that,” the WandaVision star said. “And I know there’s violence everywhere, not everywhere is perfect, and there are certainly things to be angry about and to be scared of, but – here’s that word again – ‘there’s just a calm I feel here.’”

Gun violence was the leading killer of children and teens across the US for the third year in a row, according to a Johns Hopkins University analysis published earlier this month. The 2022 data released by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions found that guns killed 2,526 children between the ages of one and 17, an average of seven youths killed a day. The youth gun rate overall doubled between 2013 and 2022.

Olsen has previously addressed how she’s considered moving to the UK. During an appearance on The Table Manners podcast in 2021, she acknowledged that she and her partner were having “the greatest time” in London, as their house was looking over the Thames.

“We’re living this British dream, in this house, in Richmond right by the water. We want to figure out how to stay here so now we want to write a rom-com… because we don’t wanna leave,” she said. “I have such an affinity for England already that last year we were looking into how we could legally live here.”

Elsewhere in her interview with The Guardian, Olsen spoke candidly about her mental health and the panic attacks she experienced throughout her twenties.

“I’ve gone through phases of it,” she said, about using medication to manage her anxiety. “Figuring out what works for me, or what works enough. No one talked about panic attacks in the mid-2000s. I thought it meant you just write a list and check things off and get over it. I didn’t realize it was something you had no control over, but I had to figure out how to have some control.”

She then confessed there were times when she had panic attacks “almost every hour” each day.

“It was literally, like, any time there was a shift in something: hot to cold, hungry to full. I thought, ‘Oh, is this OK?’ And then it would spiral and it just became this habit,” she continued.

The His Three Daughters star shared that to “interrupt the thinking process” during her anxiety, she’d start naming things she saw in her head. As a result, she hasn’t had a panic attack since.

“You learn very quickly who you feel comfortable around and who you don’t,” Olsen added.