Cast your mind back three years or so. It’s 2023, and Olivia Wilde is coming off the back of a rough year in the public eye.
Professionally, she was navigating the layers of public scrutiny surrounding her movie, Don’t Worry Darling. This involved a rumored feud with the film’s star, Florence Pugh, as well as a messy back-and-forth with Shia LaBeouf, who publicly disputed her claim that she’d fired him from the movie. We never fully got to the bottom of what really happened on that film set, but Olivia was portrayed as both a villain and a liar — and things weren’t much better in her personal life either.
Don’t Worry Darling starred Olivia’s then-boyfriend, Harry Styles, whom she met in 2020 when she cast him to replace Shia in the lead role opposite Florence. Harry and Olivia were first romantically linked in January 2021, just a few months after it was reported that she’d split from her partner of nine years, Jason Sudeikis, which led to widespread speculation that Olivia cheated on Jason with Harry. (She has denied this.)
Jason and Olivia’s split was tumultuous to say the least. They became embroiled in a very public custody dispute over their two children, in which Olivia was served legal papers while presenting onstage at CinemaCon. On top of that, a nanny who claimed to have worked for the couple around the time of their split also did a tell-all interview, alleging that Olivia “left” Jason for Harry. (Once again, Olivia and Jason denied this, saying that the nanny’s claims about their breakup were “false and scurrilous.”)
And if the battle with Jason and the Don’t Worry Darling drama weren’t already enough, Olivia rounded off her messy year with another breakup, amid reports that she and Harry had amicably ended their two-year relationship.
With all that in mind, it’s hardly surprising that Olivia took some time away from the public eye to recuperate. Now, she’s back to promote her new movie, The Invite, and she’s reflecting on alllll that went down.
“I felt like I needed to get quiet. I needed to hear myself again. There was so much noise, and it was a very unfamiliar thing for me to be thrust into such chaos,” she said, discussing her “intentional” break from the public eye on the latest episode of Call Her Daddy with host Alex Cooper. “I was suddenly in a tornado, and I needed to excuse myself from the tornado and just go and get quiet and hear myself, and process all of the pain and the lessons that I could find in it. I did a shit ton of therapy. I took it as an opportunity to rebuild myself at this point in my life, and I think there is value to that.”
“It sounds dramatic, but rock bottom is just a place to jump off from,” she continued. “For me, it did feel like a destruction, but there is beauty in destruction, because you can rebuild. I needed to take a breather and think, Wait a minute, what have I learned? Who am I? And how can I accept this humbling as a chance to spend the rest of my life as a person who has grown from this? Because I have to have grown from it, or else it was for nothing. And I’m a very different person than I was three years ago. I think a much better version of myself, because I have taken the time to process it.”
Looking back on the wide-ranging backlash on everything from her professionalism to her parenting, Alex suggested that Olivia’s “morality as a woman” was brought into question, prompting her to agree that it was a very “strange” thing to be at the receiving end of.
“I’ve never felt more disconnected from the person that people were talking about… It was also very strange to see complete fiction traded as fact,” she said. “There would be fake sources, fake stories, because once there’s a narrative formed, they are just trying to maintain that narrative, and it has nothing to do with the truth anymore.”
Alex asked what it was like to see an alleged “smear campaign being created” before her eyes, to which Olivia said her instinct was to publicly dispel the rumors about her life. However, her team didn’t think speaking out would “help,” especially as she had a larger responsibility to promote Don’t Worry Darling with the cast. “That was really hard,” she said. “I felt frustrated that I couldn’t defend myself, but it also felt like, OK, it’s not about you. It’s not about you; just get the movie out.”
Though she felt that the hate she received was “insanely disproportionate,” Olivia said she understood how it became so pervasive. “The escapism of the tabloids is something that is, in a way, very soothing for people. It’s understandable,” she said. “I think that what happens is, people become hypersensitive, they’re looking for evidence to reinforce the narrative they’ve already created about you. I don’t blame people… I mean, I felt hurt by it and confused. But, I don’t know.”
In conclusion, she said she probably would’ve handled the Don’t Worry Darling situation differently if it happened today. “I think I thought… put a fucking smile on, get out there and put on a beautiful dress, and be teflon, and that that was the way to get through it,” she recalled, acknowledging her mistake. “[But] I actually think there’s value in being vulnerable and just being like, Oh, ouch, this fucking hurts. My own attempt to be strong and rise above it, in a way, came off as inauthentic.”
Of all the “fucked-up” stuff that happened — including spit-gate at Venice Film Festival, remember that? — Olivia said that being served custody documents on stage at CinemaCon in Las Vegas was by far the worst. Noting that it was “incredibly traumatizing,” she said that she can now laugh at the fact that it became such a huge headline that Tom Cruise once brought it up during a run-in a few months later. “He was like, ‘Hi, I’m Tom. Fucked up what happened to you in Vegas,’” Olivia recalled. “And I was like, NO!!!’”
On a more serious note, Olivia said she had a lot of therapy about the incident and that she never got complete clarity on whether or not Jason planned for it to happen that way. “Jason has told me that he did not know, and I need to believe that in order to continue,” she said. “People are never their best selves when they are engaging in that kind of process, and it was so fucked up in so many ways… I know it really hurt him to see it happening to me.”
Well, it sounds like she and Jason are in a much better place as co-parents now, but that’s another story. You can find Olivia’s full Call Her Daddy interview here.
