When we meet for the first time, in London in late July, she tells me about the hug. It meant a lot to her—partly because it was so unexpected, partly because it was a show of support and fellowship from another woman, and partly because the woman was Helen Mirren. As Olivia Wilde herself might say, holy fuck. “She held me and said, ‘We’re all very proud of you,’ ” Wilde tells me. “I was like, ‘Does she think I’m someone else? She thinks I’m someone very impressive who’s done something important.’ ”
It was this past April in Las Vegas. Wilde was at CinemaCon to unveil the first trailer for her sophomore movie as director, the rich, unnerving psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling with Florence Pugh and Harry Styles. She was about to go onstage at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace and make her pitch to the industry at large and movie theater owners in particular. She had never even met Mirren before, and here she was being embraced in solidarity by not just an Oscar winner but a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
I ask Wilde what she thinks Mirren meant. “I took it to mean, in this community, anyone who steps forward and says, ‘I’ll tell a story and I will get a film made that gives actresses opportunities to have great roles…’ ” She doesn’t finish the sentence, maybe out of modesty. “That’s what I hope she’s proud of.”
If Mirren had known what Wilde went through to make the movie—let alone the nasty surprise that awaited her when she walked on the stage moments later, or the wind tunnel of gossip in store at the Venice International Film Festival in September—she’d have hugged her even harder.
We talk at a pottery class in North London. I asked if we could start our interviews somewhere other than a restaurant, and Wilde gamely suggested this. She’s running very slightly late, so she texts: “Julie! Hi it’s Olivia! I’m on my way. Tube strike made getting a car a bit of a clusterfuck but I will be with you by 11:05. X.”
Wilde is a perfectionist—she ends up being on time—but pottery puts her at ease. “Everything else in my life, I want to be very good at: work, parenting, friendships, exercise,” she tells me. “I’ll go to a Pilates class or dance class and get really competitive. This is the one thing that I feel completely zen about. My entire Instagram feed is just, like, people throwing pots.” Soon we’re each seated at pottery wheels with mounds of clay. Our instructor is an artist named Freya, who serves us tea in proper cups and encourages us with phrases like “just squidge it up.” If Freya or Wilde is appalled by my interpretation of an ancient art form, they do not show it. (When we’ve parted for the day, Wilde texts me a photo she took of me looking bemused at the wheel, along with the winking caption, “Master of her craft.”) Wilde herself is warm, serene, and engaged at the wheel. As we talk about Don’t Worry Darling—and the demands on someone who’s acting in, directing, and producing a movie—there’s a nice irony to the fact that she’s blissed out and making a bowl.
Wilde remembers filming one scene in particular. In it, her and Pugh’s characters—glamorous 1950s housewives named Bunny and Alice—sun themselves by a pool, drink cocktails, and while away the hours until their mysterious husbands return home from their mysterious jobs. Wilde’s real work, however, began in earnest after she called “Cut” and dashed to the monitor to watch the take. “On my way, there’s a producer telling me updates on COVID shutdowns and casting decisions,” she says, working the pottery wheel’s pedal with an off-white Converse sneaker. “Then I get to the monitor, talk to my D.P., make decisions about the actual shot, and walk back. On the way back, someone else grabs my arm, tells me updates on costumes, production design, et cetera. Then I get back, sit down, call “Action,” act, get up, and do it again. I’ve never been more exhausted in my life than at the end of those days.”
Wilde had asked around before introducing another hyphen to her job description. “I spoke to a lot of actor-directors about it, and they were encouraging,” she says. “But I realized later I had asked only men.” Because she was in period costume for the movie, she often directed in structured dresses, a wig, and heels. For the pool scene, she was wearing a bikini. “So I was already dealing with that,” she says, meaning the self-consciousness. Wilde included her young daughter, Daisy, in the scene, so she also had a toddler on her hip as she sprinted between responsibilities on set. “I was like, I wonder if this experience is slightly different for men?”
Later, Katie Silberman, a writer-producer on both Darling and Wilde’s first movie, Booksmart, will tell me, “When I was little and I pictured a director in my head, it was always a man with a beard and glasses in a jean jacket with a bullhorn. Watching Olivia on the set, I was like, Oh, this is the image of a director that my daughter’s going to have—this really talented, powerful, beautiful woman with her own daughter on her hip directing and leading all of these men and women on this set that she was so empathetically in charge of.”
Don’t Worry Darling is a bold pivot after Booksmart. Wilde’s first movie was a funny, slyly subversive story about two overachieving seniors (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever) who realize they’ve unfairly judged their fun-loving classmates and try to pack four years’ worth of high school extracurriculars into one night. The comedy updated the John Hughes coming-of-age formula, debunking social stereotypes, spreading kind and inclusive messages, and examining the complexities of female friendship. Darling, though, takes an ambitious leap, not just in its surreal, almost sci-fi beauty but in the depth of its message about the strength of women and the courage it requires to question an oppressive system when absolutely everyone is saying, What system? What oppression? Pugh is ferociously good as the rebellious Alice, who’s either as crazy as they all say or being gaslighted by an entire palm-fringed oasis of a company town in the desert, including her stylish, exuberant husband, Jack (Styles). When we meet in London in July, Wilde is still floored by the fact that Darling will premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in the company of works by Darren Aronofsky, Noah Baumbach, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu. “To be among those filmmakers,” she says, “holy fuck.”
Wilde nods at the clay bowl she’s making and tells me she can tell that it’s centered because it suddenly looks still while the wheel spins wildly around it. The symbolism calms her: When everything is in chaos, you just have to stay focused.
I ask how she maintained her zen while captaining a movie during a pandemic. “You must never show fear,” she says. “Actors don’t want to sense that a director is ever unsure of themselves. Open and flexible, yes.” As for emotion? “There’s no time for emotion.”
Our pottery goes into the kiln. Wilde’s piece is a beautiful, display-worthy salad bowl. Mine is…not something we need to talk about. We walk through North London to a café, Wilde guiding us with a map on her phone. We’d dressed in anticipation of making a mess in the pottery class: Wilde’s hair is held back in a seafoam clip, and she’s wearing jeans, a long-sleeve black shirt, and a necklace with a gold cross that pop fans on social media have noticed is identical to one previously worn by Harry Styles. Our arms are covered with clay. “We’re really wearing our hobby, aren’t we?” Wilde says. She tells me she’ll rock the look proudly all day.
Wilde has been living in London on and off since Darling wrapped filming. As everyone with an internet connection knows, she and Styles have embarked on a relationship that’s set social media ablaze and lifted morale for 30-something single mothers everywhere. (She has two young children, Daisy and Otis, with her former fiancé, Jason Sudeikis. She was previously married to the filmmaker Tao Ruspoli.) Wilde has adapted well to part-time London life. She’s even taken to cold-water swimming—“not like there’s an option here,” she deadpans—in the bucolic neighborhood where Styles lives.
When we’ve settled into a booth at the café, Wilde tells me that she loves how Europe welcomes children into adult life. “Restaurants or most businesses, no one balks at the idea of a kid,” she says. “In the States, it’s like, you’ve brought in a dog. Or worse than a dog—like you’ve brought in some, like, small crocodile on a leash.”
Wilde was raised in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, by a family so devotedly literary that the communal claw-foot tub in the bathroom downstairs was filled with books. (When changing her last name at the beginning of her acting career, she tipped her hat to Oscar Wilde.) Wilde’s father is Andrew Cockburn, a Peabody-winning documentarian and Harper’s Magazine editor. Her mother, Leslie Cockburn, is an investigative journalist and Emmy-winning producer who crisscrossed war zones throughout her career. (Both Cockburns have contributed to V.F.) While pregnant with Wilde, Leslie Cockburn was evacuated from a flight in the Middle East because there was a bomb on board. While pregnant with Charlie, Olivia’s younger brother, she was held up at gunpoint while making a documentary in Somalia. Wilde tells me that, growing up, one of her parents’ most inspiring refrains was this: “Don’t be boring.”
“It affected every decision,” she says. “Any crossroads I came to where there was one option that was safer than the other, I would take the less safe route. That led to some great things, like taking a chance on being an actor.”
After graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Wilde studied acting in Ireland for a summer. She postponed Bard College—first temporarily, then permanently—and moved to L.A. with her parents’ blessing. Hollywood being what it is, Wilde’s early roles often underestimated her intelligence and clashed with her deeply held feminism. In Alpha Dog, she had to sit at a table and laugh as her male costars sexually and physically harassed a waitress. Many of the movies, of course, treated nudity and objectification like set dressing. “You feel like you have to be this thing,” Wilde tells me, “so it’s therefore devoid of any real sexuality and it’s empty. And you feel, at the end of the day, what is the difference between me and a prostitute right now? Not much. But I wouldn’t blame that on the directors I worked with. I think they are sometimes unable to understand how it feels because they haven’t been in that situation.”
As time went on, Wilde snagged more substantial roles in the hit medical series House, Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies, and Reed Morano’s Meadowland, where she played a grieving mother. She also used acting as a kind of film school and shadowed legends: Spike Jonze on Her, Ron Howard on Rush, Clint Eastwood on Richard Jewell, and Martin Scorsese on Vinyl. “She really cares that people feel safe and comfortable on set,” says Dever, a friend since Booksmart. “That is a testament to her being on so many different kinds of sets as an actor herself and pulling from the best.”
When Wilde turned to Don’t Worry Darling, she sought advice from more experienced peers, including Christopher McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning The Usual Suspects screenwriter, who wrote and directed the last four Mission: Impossible films. “She wasn’t defensive or precious,” McQuarrie says. “She didn’t want the core concept of her movie to be validated—she wanted it to be challenged. You can’t begin to fathom how rare that is.”
After one meeting, McQuarrie could already envision Wilde’s career as a director. Some of it, he admits, may be tough: “She understood things after her first film that I was still sorting out after four. I knew after that meeting that she was the real deal. I also knew she was in for a hard road. Olivia is straightforward, which the town doesn’t like. And she wanted to do something different for her next film. The town doesn’t like that either.”
Wilde says her dedication to a safe set was tested before cameras even rolled on Don’t Worry Darling. She’d initially cast Shia LaBeouf, not Styles, to play Alice’s husband. But during preproduction, Wilde tells me in London, Pugh told her that she was uncomfortable with LaBeouf’s behavior. Wilde says she called LaBeouf herself and fired him: “My responsibility was towards her. I’m like a mother wolf. Making the call was tricky, but in a way he understood. I don’t think it would’ve been a process he enjoyed. He comes at his work with an intensity that can be combative. It wasn’t the ethos that I demand in my productions. I want him to get well and to evolve because I think it’s a great loss to the film industry when someone that talented is unable to work.” LaBeouf denies any problematic behavior. He and his wife recently had a daughter, and he’s been cast in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.
Shortly after LaBeouf departed, two women unrelated to Darling accused the actor of physical, mental, and emotional abuse, and he told The New York Times, “I have no excuses for my alcoholism or aggression, only rationalizations. I have been abusive to myself and everyone around me for years…. I’m ashamed of that history and am sorry to those I hurt.” Wilde admired the women who told their stories. “It’s easy to fire someone compared to coming out and talking about abuse,” she says. “That’s difficult. That takes courage.”
Reports of LaBeouf being fired first surfaced in 2020, but after Wilde and I spoke, the actor publicly disputed her recollection, saying, in an email he shared with Variety, “I quit your film,” and claiming he left the production because there wouldn’t be enough rehearsal time. After the premiere in Venice, as private messages between Pugh and LaBeouf are parsed giddily online, Wilde tells me this: “This issue is so much more nuanced than can be explained in private texts released out of context. All I’ll say is he was replaced, and there was no going forward with him. I wish him the best in his recovery.”
A source with knowledge of the situation tells V.F. that the truth is a couple shades of gray: The actor was indeed unhappy with the limited amount of rehearsal time that Pugh had available, and Pugh, in turn, was uncomfortable with his intensity. LaBeouf is said to have given Wilde an ultimatum—she had to choose between him and his costar. Wilde chose Pugh. The tricky, and quintessentially Hollywood, part is that, to spare LaBeouf’s ego, she seems to have allowed him to believe what he wanted to believe: that he was quitting.
Despite the expressions of kindness in LaBeouf’s email to Wilde, his response was wounding. Among other things, he released a video that Wilde sent him—apparently before Pugh registered her discomfort with the actor—in which she encourages him to stay on the film, and utters a phrase that could not have endeared her with the true star of her movie: “I think this might be a bit of a wake-up call for Miss Flo.”
In any case, Wilde had a major role to recast, so she returned to her original notes. “I have that piece of notebook paper where I had written my top three ideas,” she says. “Harry was the first one and it was circled a bunch of times. Then I’d written in another pen on another day, like, ‘Unavailable. Damn! On tour.’ ” Wilde called Styles’s agent to see if COVID had affected his schedule. It had. Styles is a pop superstar, but his only previous acting credit at the time was Dunkirk. Wilde conferred with crew who had worked with him on the film, met him over Zoom, got Pugh’s sign-off, and hired him.
“My thing with Harry was that I knew he was fearless,” she says. “I’d rather work with a non-actor who’s fearless than a trained actor who is full of hang-ups and baggage and judgment. What I love about working with singers and dancers is they commit 100 percent because, as a dancer, if you don’t commit 100 percent, you get hurt. With singers, it’s the same. If they sing at 30 percent, that song doesn’t work. I think actors sometimes think they can get away with 30 percent.”
During preproduction, Wilde gave the cast a list of books, articles, music, and movies to absorb, including The Truman Show, Inception, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the original 1960 version of Ocean’s 11. Styles was inspired and sent her some song recommendations, and even did one better and wrote some music for the movie. “He called me one day and was like, ‘Hey, what are you using for the trigger song?’ ” Wilde says, meaning the recurring piece that accompanies Alice’s gradual awakening to buried truths. Wilde didn’t really have the music vocabulary to articulate what she wanted yet—something “sort of classic, contemporary, simple, melodic, romantic,” she told Styles. She had reached out to a few artists but was still searching. “Harry was like, ‘Huh.’ Then five minutes later he sent me a demo from his piano. I was like, ‘Yep, that’s it. That’s the song. Thank you very much.’ ”
It’s always good to have a backup career option, I say.
“He will absolutely end up scoring films for fun,” says Wilde.
The fact that Styles is an outspoken feminist—and cuts a dashing figure in gender-neutral fashion—came in handy too. There’s a scene in Darling that pays homage to The Apartment, with Styles doing his best Jack Lemmon in the kitchen and struggling to prepare dinner in a ruffled apron. “Harry and I had a conversation about that apron,” Wilde says. “I brought it to him and said, ‘What do you think about wearing this?’ He said, ‘Yeah, great, why?’ I said, ‘It’s a practical thing to wipe your hands on. And it’s also sending a message that this man isn’t insecure about his masculinity and he is making himself equivalent to his wife.” Wearing an apron was not an issue for Harry Styles, to say the least.
It was still early in the pandemic when Wilde began shooting—virtually no one had started filming in L.A. again. “I had a little bit of weight on my shoulders,” she says. People called to tell her that everyone was watching her production to see if the film industry in Los Angeles had a future. “Have fun,” they said. “Break a leg.”
A troubling rumor emerged about the Don’t Worry Darling set. I say “troubling” because it has a misogynist air to it and continues to bounce through social media. The rumor has it that Wilde—a director making a film that would vastly affect her career—was so smitten with Styles that she neglected or otherwise alienated Pugh, and that Pugh and/or the cinematographer even had to direct some scenes.
I ask Wilde about it while we’re at lunch. It’s the first of several sensitive subjects we have to cover, and other actors might choose to no-comment them all with a middle finger. Wilde does not. She’s a forthright person—plus, she’s taken enough flak online in enough areas of her life that she’s going to speak up for herself.
“It is very rare that people assume the best from women in power,” she says. “I think they don’t often give us the benefit of the doubt. Florence did the job I hired her to do, and she did it exquisitely. She blew me away. Every day I was in awe of her, and we worked very well together.” She pauses. “It is ironic that now, with my second film—which is again about the incredible power of women, what we’re capable of when we unite, and how easy it is to strip a woman of power by using other women to judge and shame them—we’re talking about this.”
Darling is so stylistically and thematically unified that it seems improbable that its director could have punted anything.
“The idea that I had five seconds in the day to be distracted by anything is laughable,” she says. “I was there before everyone. I was there after everyone. And it was a dream. It’s not like this work was not enjoyable. It was just all-encompassing.”
Wilde points out that Pugh’s character goes on the most difficult journey in the film by far. “She’s going through a cataclysmic existential breakdown, while everyone else is at a dinner party like, ‘La-di-da,’ smoking cigarettes,” says Wilde. “My tendency is to be everyone’s best friend and to socialize, and I think she often just needed the time and space to focus, so the way I supported her was to give her space and to be there if she needed anything. Florence was very focused on turning out that performance, which I can assure you took all of her energy.”
Matthew Libatique, Don’t Worry Darling’s celebrated cinematographer, backs up Wilde: “It was one of the most harmonious sets I’ve ever been on, and I’m in the middle of the storm.”
Pugh didn’t respond to V.F.’s requests for this piece, and her silence about the movie has generally been taken as shade aimed at its director. When I speak to Wilde in London, she tells me, “Florence is one of the most in-demand actresses in the universe. She’s on set on Dune. I gather that some people expect for her to be engaging more on social media. I didn’t hire her to post. I hired her to act. She fulfilled every single expectation I had of her. That’s all that matters to me.”
Even after the tension in Venice, Wilde stands by her star and her team: “Florence’s performance in this film is astounding. It’s just baffling to me that the media would rather focus on baseless rumors and gossip, thereby overshadowing her profound talent. She deserves more than that. As does the movie, and everyone who worked so hard on it.”
More personal rumors have dogged Wilde too. Though her split from Sudeikis was initially friendly, the timeline of their breakup has become a point of public contention. Last year, Sudeikis told GQ that the relationship ended in November 2020, which was just two months before Wilde was photographed holding Styles’s hand. Strangers on the internet took this to be Sudeikis’s way of suggesting that the relationships overlapped.
I see Wilde a few days after our pottery class, during a lunch break at the shoot for this story, and I raise all this. True to form, she answers without flinching.
“The complete horseshit idea that I left Jason for Harry is completely inaccurate,” she says. “Our relationship was over long before I met Harry. Like any relationship that ends, it doesn’t end overnight. Unfortunately, Jason and I had a very bumpy road, and we officially dissolved the relationship towards the beginning of the pandemic. We were raising two kids during lockdown, so we co-parented through that time. Once it became clear that cohabitating was no longer beneficial for the children, it became the responsible thing to not, because we could be better parents as friends who live in different houses.”
Wilde is glammed up for the shoot—oversized blue men’s shirt and pants, blue eye shadow, giant curls—and the artifice makes the rawness of what she’s saying even more striking. “But, yeah,” she says, “I don’t understand the need to create false narratives and drama around this kind of stuff. It’s like, haven’t the kids been through enough?”
Wilde says she has been “very up front” with her children about the situation: “They understand the concept of making decisions to protect yourself and to live an authentic, happy life. They really do. I evolved a lot between when I was 27 and 35. I found myself as a director. And I think I found myself as an individual. And sometimes when you evolve, you evolve out of relationships that were based on an earlier version of yourself.”
At CinemaCon, after the contact high of Mirren’s hug, Wilde walked onstage—and into a trap. A woman in the crowd below pushed a manila envelope toward her. Wilde picked it up and opened it, jokingly asking if it was a script. It was not. The envelope contained legal papers regarding the custody of her and Sudeikis’s children. She had been served. Wilde closed the envelope and continued with her presentation without missing a beat. “In that moment, I had a job to do and I did my job,” she says. “I was able to compartmentalize quite easily because I cared so deeply and the film was so much work.”
A source close to Sudeikis insisted that the actor had not known when or where the papers would be served and would never condone such a turn of events. Wilde suspects Sudeikis orchestrated the stunt “to disrupt” her big moment.
“So many people were shocked on my behalf,” she says. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t that shocked. There’s a reason that I didn’t stay in that relationship. Unfortunately, that was consistent with my experience of the relationship. So I was probably the least shocked. But I was also deeply saddened by it—and disturbed by it in lots of ways…. I know it took an extraordinary amount of energy [for the server] to get in that room. It took a tremendous amount of forethought. And I will tell you, there are so many other ways to do that. I am not someone who lives in hiding. If that experience hadn’t been public, I never would have spoken of it, because I never would want my kids to know that happened. Unfortunately, they will know that happened.”
There is, as there always is, video of the whole thing.
Wilde has long been a troll magnet on social media because of her politics. But in the past two years, she has received particularly vicious comments, and they’ve shaken her. And “I’m fucking tough,” she says. “Like, the whole world saw me get served [custody] papers.” She continues: “I’ve had women judging me for separating from Jason. There are people who feel entitled to hurl horrendous insults at me and my family. Telling me I’m a terrible mother. Threatening me and my kids or saying I should lose my children.” She says people mistakenly assume that when she is photographed with Styles, she is neglecting her kids—but Sudeikis has equal custody. “When they are with their father, I trust him to be a great parent. So when they’re not with me, I continue to live my life. But the judgment I’ve seen from people for living my life…”
In February 2021, the talk show host Wendy Williams, extrapolating wildly from paparazzi photos, launched into a monologue about Wilde on air. “You don’t throw away your kids and your fiancé,” she told her studio audience, then turned to the camera and upbraided Wilde directly: “When your children grow up, Olivia, you’re going to look like the worst mother who ever done it.”
Says Wilde, “It broke my heart, not because I care deeply about the opinion of Wendy Williams, but the applause from the audience made me sick. I was like, ‘Why are these women finding pleasure in this moment? Is it because it somehow makes them feel better about their lives, judgments, and choices without ever wondering why I might have made those choices?’ ”
For the sake of her children, Wilde models Michelle Obama’s exhortation, “When they go low, we go high.” “I just remember that nobody knows my private life except my very small, trusted circle,” she says. “And my self-worth can in no way be connected to perception, because that’s just a losing battle.”
I tell Wilde that I’m still stuck on the fact that she went from the fantasy high of getting Mirren’s blessing to being publicly served custody papers within a span of minutes.
“So twisted, right?” she says. “My favorite Carrie Fisher quote is, ‘If my life weren’t funny, it would just be true, and that’s unacceptable.’ ” She steers the conversation back into upbeat territory. “Helen Mirren,” she says. “Now I can’t stop thinking about her. Maybe Helen’s the reason I got through it.”
Wilde is careful about what she says about her relationship with Styles. “I think once you crack open the window,” as she puts it, “you can’t then be mad when mosquitoes come in. It’s like, ‘You opened the window.’ ” Still, his effect on her life is clear between the lines of what she does say.
She tells me about watching him play a 21,000-person arena. Standing next to her was Jenny Lewis, the indie rock icon who had opened the show. “We were looking around, and she said, ‘That’s a lot of happy women,’ ” Wilde remembers, noting that, of course, there were many men in the arena too. “I instantly started crying. Where else do we see this? Happy women? Women brought together with joy, loving each other, and cheering for each other? This has been like a gift to be amongst this.”
Wilde makes a point of saying that Styles’s fans have welcomed her with open arms: “His fans are a beautiful and loving group of people. I have had the opportunity to witness some of the most moving examples of compassion and acceptance. Standing in a room with 20,000 happy women, that’s….” She fishes for the appropriate words but can’t find them.
Would Wilde consider marrying again? The short answer is yes. She’s always looked to her parents as a model for a healthy partnership: “It’s incredibly supportive and they’ve evolved, individually and as a couple, through so many unexpected twists and turns. They’re best friends. And I think that’s what marriage really is. It’s a commitment to a best friendship. And a partnership. I think now I really understand what that means.”
Wilde stands by advice that she got from a mall Santa Claus about a decade ago. She and her friend had gotten in line at the Grove in L.A. as a joke, but Santa actually blew their minds with his sage wisdom: “Santa said, ‘Fill up your own love cup. Let someone fall in love with your overflow.’ Even though it comes from this ludicrous source, I have told so many people, ‘You’ve just got to fill up your own love cup.’ Thousands of dollars of therapy did not give us what five minutes of mall Santa did.”
In the weeks after I saw Wilde in London, of course, the internet began feasting on Don’t Worry Darling. By the time the movie premiered in Venice, the nickname “Miss Flo” had trended on Twitter, and seemed to have exacerbated whatever frustrations Pugh had on set. The press conference in Venice—which Pugh skipped, claiming scheduling problems—was like a bad day in the White House pressroom. Wilde made clear she was there to talk about what was on the screen, not gossip, saying, “The internet feeds itself.” Chris Pine appeared zoned out to a lot of people on social media and immediately became a meme. Ultimately, a festival official ended the conference with many hands still in the air.
After the press conference, Pugh’s stylist posted a video of her strolling breezily through the festival, Aperol spritz in hand, and she was applauded in some quarters as an icon of “quiet quitting.” At the premiere—where to begin?—the director and her leading lady were seated three cast members apart, which inspired cracks like this on Twitter: “Whoever made this seating arrangement has planned a wedding with divorced parents.” A video of Styles taking his seat was examined with Zapruder-like intensity to ascertain whether he had spit on Chris Pine. (He had not.) Even when the film got a seven-minute standing ovation, observers were quick to point out that Pugh and Wilde didn’t seem to make eye contact during it.
In an email after Venice—when they go low, we go high—Wilde tells me, “Venice was a whirlwind—from the minute I got into the first boat and was zooming through the canals, to the first glance of the Grand Canal and St. Mark’s Basilica to seeing the billboard for DWD towering over the Lido—it was a fantasy coming true. To stand together with our cast, and finally show the film to an audience of film lovers, was so moving! Watching Arianne [Phillips] win her Passion for Film award was incredibly emotional. I felt so proud of her, of Katie Byron our production designer, who was there with us, as well as Matty Libatique, our genius DP. This film family went through a lot together, and it was extremely meaningful to celebrate together that night.”
A source tells me that, privately, Wilde was crushed by what went on at the festival, but, as with the unpleasant surprise at CinemaCon, she had a job to do and she got through it. Ironically, even mixed reviews of the movie singled out Pugh’s magnetic performance, which is also a testament to Wilde who, as director and producer, spent three years willing it into the world.
“Every mistake, you’ve learned something major,” Wilde had told me in London. “Everything is a chapter or a page. As you get older, the fleeting nature of emotional states becomes so clear. And you take comfort in knowing that the only things that last are the lessons you learn from each moment.” She added, “It becomes more and more clear to me that the really fucked-up, difficult parts of life are what make you a better person, a better mother, a better friend, a better artist.”
Internet gossips will no doubt be relieved to hear that Wilde’s priority continues to be her children. “There’s nothing that is more important to me,” she says. “I love driving to school every morning,” she says. “I love making pancakes. I love putting them to bed every night. They’re my best friends.” She credits her kids with giving her strength in the face of public scrutiny: “We almost find more strength in protecting others than protecting ourselves. I think that I am able to withstand all of the nonsense because I’m protecting them.”
Wilde is readying to direct a handful of movies: a feature documentary, her first, about the legendary Los Angeles roller skating rink Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace. A secret Marvel project. A movie about the Olympian Kerri Strug and the fraught world of gymnastics.
She doesn’t currently have plans to act again, though that could change with the right script. She’s always been troubled by the idea that actresses are supposed to quietly die at the age of 40. “How is it that the more experience I have, the less valuable I am?” she says. “Because as an actress, the older you get, the less opportunities you have. With directing, the more experience you have, the more valuable you are. You want to be Agnès Varda. You want people to think, ‘Oh, by the time you’re 80, you’ll be so good.’ ”
A version of this story appears in the October 2022 print issue.
Hair products by Oribe. Makeup products by Dior. Nail enamel by Revolution Express. Hair by Shon Hyungsun Ju. Makeup by Wendy Rowe. Manicure by Sabrina Gayle. Tailor, Michelle Warner. Set design by Trish Stephenson. Produced on location by Shiny Projects. Styled by Leith Clark. Photographed exclusively for V.F. by Emma Summerton in London. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
Anne Hathaway on Tuning Out the Haters and Embracing Her True Self
Scenes From the Knives-Out Feud Between Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer
Eddie Redmayne, Liza Minnelli, and the Untold History of Cabaret
Deprived of His 12 Daily Diet Cokes, Trump Falls Asleep (Again) at Trial
While Melania Thinks the Hush Money Trial Is a “Disgrace”: Report
The 25 Best True-Crime Documentaries to Binge Right Now
From the Archive: The Devil in Bette Davis
Stay in the know and subscribe to Vanity Fair for just
$2.50$1 per month.
