Olivia Wilde Had to Disappear

Her last movie was panned, and her life dissected: “I don’t think you know what you’re made of until you fall apart.”

- Monica Corcoran Harel

ABOUT FIVE MONTHS ago, Olivia Wilde was standing stage right at the Eccles Center theater in Park City, Utah, just after the credits rolled on her third feature film, The Invite.

“I white-knuckled my way through that screening. My inner monologue was like, They all hated it,” she recalls on a May afternoon at a Blue Bottle Coffee in Los Angeles, dressed down in jeans and a red vintage sweatshirt. Row by row, the audience rose to its feet. People were getting up quickly to leave in droves, she'd thought. Even more humiliating, she was supposed to participate in a Q&A onstage with her cast. But nobody was walking out. A smattering of claps became resounding applause. They were giving Wilde a standing ovation. “That’s when I started whispering to myself, ‘Don't cry. Don't cry,’” she says.

The filmmaker had good reason to feel apprehensive. Booksmart, Wilde’s 2019 directorial debut about two brainy high-school seniors who realize they wasted their time working too hard and partying too little, was widely celebrated, but it didn’t make a big dent at the box office. And when her second feature, Don't Worry Darling, hit theaters in 2022, it was mostly panned. (The Guardian called it “empty feminism.”) Tabloids revealed she was dating Harry Styles, her decade-younger costar, and reported on alleged major friction between Wilde and star Florence Pugh. The buzz was bad. “I have never had a screaming match on my set. I was never not available on set. I wanted to be like, ‘None of this is true,’” she now says about those rumors.