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Over the last few years, the promotional circuit for movie stars has transformed entirely. Where once you could expect sit-down interviews and hagiographic magazine profiles, now any time an actor makes a film they have to be subjected to a flurry of YouTube parlour games; eating weird sweets and trying to remember lines from their old films or, in the case of Hot Ones, willingly giving themselves diarrhoea.
Now the goalposts have shifted again. Elizabeth Olsen was recently at the premiere of her new movie Eternity, about a woman who has to pick a partner for the afterlife. And rather than hitting the usual circuit, Olsen has decided to promote the film by expressing her belief that she’s going to die alone.
Actually, it’s a little weirder than that. Olsen doesn’t just think that she’s going to die alone; she thinks that she’s going to die alone in a very specific geographical location. Here’s the quote she gave to Variety in full:
When I was in high school, I dreamt of being a very old lady on the coast of England, alone actually. I might have had an animal, and it would be like foggy and wet and kind of cold, and I would go on long walks and I would be in a small town that had like one of each thing you need like one bakery, one coffee shop, one fishmonger, one cheese shop, one like community centre, one theatre. It was always just me because I like meeting new people and I like being a part of a community, and I always imagined I would die alone.
Bizarrely, this is not the first time that Olsen has revealed this. When she appeared on Marc Maron’s podcast a year ago, she mentioned the whole “dying alone in England” thing, expanding on the theme by adding that she also assumes that she’ll have an affair with an old man.
It’s fascinating but, as a format, “Famous person imagines their final days” probably doesn’t have the same pull as, say, Chicken Shop Date. It’s unlikely that Timothée Chalamet will try to promote Marty Supreme by expanding on the notion that one day he’s going to slip in the shower and his phone will be too far out of reach to call for help, or that Tom Holland will use the release of The Odyssey as a chance to tell everyone that he fears he’ll be unable to emotionally reconcile with his adult children from his deathbed.
Even worse for Olsen, it’s unlikely that her dream will ever come true. She’s an in-demand A-list actor who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, so all manner of things will have to go wrong for her to end up an anonymous old lady pacing around the foggy English coast.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to lean into this fantasy a little by figuring out exactly where Olsen should die alone. We know it should be on the English coast, but that doesn’t exactly narrow things down, since England has thousands of miles of coastline.
She says she wants it to be foggy and wet and cold, which probably rules out a lot of the south. Although somewhere like Eastbourne sounds like it would be perfect, since the place is crammed to the gills with elderly people, it unfortunately receives more sunshine than almost anywhere else on the coast, and that’s clearly a big no-no for Olsen.
Filey in North Yorkshire sounds like it would be a good bet – it’s certainly moody, and the sort of place where you could easily feel quite lonely – except that it doesn’t have a theatre or a cheesemonger. There’s always Berwick-upon-Tweed, which has The Maltings theatre and Doddington’s Dairy, but unfortunately it is often cited as England’s happiest town, which doesn’t really bode well for anyone who longs to die alone.
There is, however, one town that fits the bill. It’s old, it’s cold, there’s a storied theatre and a specialist cheese shop. I’ve never been there without being drizzled on, and the entire place walks the difficult line between being relatively pretty and relatively depressing. That’s right, if Olsen really does intend to die alone in England, then Scarborough is the place to be. I’m sure the tourist board will be thrilled.
