{"id":890785,"date":"2026-09-13T18:06:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T18:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/890785\/"},"modified":"2026-09-13T18:06:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T18:06:12","slug":"olivia-wilde-on-the-invite-i-want-your-sex-and-creative-rebirth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/890785\/","title":{"rendered":"Olivia Wilde on ‘The Invite,’ ‘I Want Your Sex,’ and Creative Rebirth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t
\n\t\t\tO
\n\t\tlivia Wilde<\/a> would be the first to tell you she knows nothing about farming. But recently, the actor turned filmmaker was talking to a friend and the subject of fallowing came up. \u201cIt\u2019s when farmers take a year off and the soil gets turned over,\u201d she explains. \u201cIt becomes full of nutrients again. I heard him describe the artistic need to give the crops some time off and let everything rejuvenate.\u201d She pauses. \u201cAfter what I went through, I could have just jumped right back into the ring. But I took some time to turn the soil over.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tClearly, Wilde\u2019s time away has paid off, turning 2026 into a creative annus mirabilis. It started at Sundance this past January, which saw the premiere of not one but two Wilde projects about love, sex, and the emotional minefield of modern relationships. The first was I Want Your Sex, the latest from cult director Gregg Araki, which centers on a no-holds-barred BDSM affair between a performance artist, played by Wilde, and her much younger assistant (Cooper Hoffman<\/a>). The second was The Invite<\/a>, a remake of the 2020 Spanish movie The People Upstairs, about a dinner party between two married couples that goes off the rails. Wilde directed the comedy of manners and co-stars opposite Seth Rogen, Pen\u00e9lope Cruz, and Edward Norton.<\/p>\n

\n\tBoth hit theaters in July, giving Wilde a big moment back in the spotlight. More important, both represent a rebirth of sorts for her. Wilde not only rebounded from some very public PR crises (a divorce that turned messy; gossip-mongering and judgment over the relationship that followed, with Harry Styles; rumors of behind-the-scenes turmoil on her sophomore feature, Don\u2019t Worry Darling), but she also came back with a vengeance, delivering a one-two punch of the best work of her career. \u201cI think what you\u2019re potentially sensing onscreen in both these roles is a true lack of fucks given,\u201d Wilde says, laughing. \u201cThe kind of vulnerability [needed] for The Invite in particular wouldn\u2019t have been possible if I hadn\u2019t been knocked on my ass.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tWilde had never seen the original film on which The Invite is based; she\u2019d been sent the script by Will McCormack and Ra\u00adshida Jones, who\u2019d been hired to write an English-language redo. She had just come off a year of traveling, reading a lot of books, watching a lot of movies, \u201cand letting the dust settle.\u201d Wilde was initially unsure whether she would ever act again, but she\u2019d signed on to do an episode of The Studio, her friend Seth Rogen\u2019s showbiz comedy on Apple TV, and then Araki\u2019s film. Those two roles \u2014 one a par\u00adody of herself as an egomaniac, the other a sexed-up artist who was like \u201cthe devil on my shoulder\u201d (loosely based on Truth or Dare-era Madonna, she says) \u2014 helped her get rid of a certain self-consciousness she\u2019d admittedly felt in front of the camera in the past.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, when The Invite came to her, Wilde wasn\u2019t interested in starring \u2014 she wanted to direct it. She saw it as the perfect opportunity to check off several items on her filmmaking bucket list, from shooting sequentially on 35mm film to \u201chaving my Sidney Lumet experience: one room, rehearse the damn thing, and let it evolve as we go along.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe immediately reached out to Rogen to play Joe, a caustic former musician who\u2019s married to the anxious Angela. Norton, who\u2019d at one point considered remaking The People Upstairs, told Wilde he\u2019d do anything to play the New Age-y neighbor Hawk. For his wife, a therapist named Pi\u00f1a, Wilde thought of Cruz, who she\u2019d long considered to be a first-rate comedian. The fourth part proved trickier. When an actor who\u2019d been circling the role of Angela dropped out, Wilde began pitching various replacement candidates to Rogen and Norton.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was sort of my \u2018Fuck you\u2019 to every time I felt I\u2019d been forced to be an object of desire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe had a text chain going with the three of us,\u201d Norton says by phone in a separate interview. \u201c[Olivia would say,] \u2018What about this person? Isn\u2019t she great? We should check on her!\u2019 Seth and I were like, \u2018What\u2019s going on here?\u2019 Then finally we just told her, \u2018Olivia, the obvious answer is that you should play Angela. It\u2019s not just the best part of your career \u2014 you\u2019re perfect for it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWilde reluctantly agreed to do double duty, a decision she\u2019s now very glad she made. \u201cI felt \u2026 unlocked,\u201d she says. Part of it was that Angela, an uptight fortysomething urbanite desperate to impress her sexually adventurous neighbors, ironically turned out to be a \u201cphysically liberating role. It was sort of my \u2018Fuck you\u2019 to every time I felt I\u2019d been forced to be an object of desire.\u201d Part of it was that, even with the pressure of wearing two metaphorical hats on one project, \u201cbeing so inside the energy of the performances, I could better feel when we were on the right path. I think that would have been harder to feel from behind the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tPlaying Angela also presented a chance to make The Invite a very personal project \u2014 to create a space where she and her collaborators could be not just funny, but also truly vulnerable. Before shooting, Wilde assembled her fellow actors and the screenwriters, and the group spent two weeks workshopping the material. This process involved a lot of conversation about their own experiences, fears, and regrets, and what constitutes a healthy long-term relationship after the initial rush of romance transforms into something more complicated. Whenever someone contributed an interesting idea, Jones and McCormack would begin incorporating it into the script. By the time production started, they\u2019d radically changed The Invite into something that felt less like a remake and more 100 percent their own.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe resulting film earned a standing ovation at Sundance and a bidding war that ended with A24 buying The Invite for $12 million. (Magnolia would pick up I Want Your Sex shortly after the fest ended.) Wilde insisted on a theatrical release as part of her deal, suspecting that the movie\u2019s extremely frank and funny digressions about everything from middle-age malaise to the benefits of pegging would play better in front of people sitting together in the dark. She was proved right when The Invite ended up becoming a sleeper hit after it arrived in theaters this summer. \u201cSharing those conversations in a public forum is something that we still feel a little bit nervous about,\u201d Wilde says. \u201cBut the nerves are what make it fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s clear that, even if The Invite hadn\u2019t hit as big as it did, it most definitely turned over the soil for Wilde. She\u2019s already prepping her next film, in London; she\u2019s reluctant to go into details, other than to say that, like The Invite, it\u2019s a comedy. And it reflects where she\u2019s at now in her life, as she shifts into what feels like a second or maybe third act.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDidn\u2019t Miles Davis say, \u2018It takes you a long time to learn to sound like yourself\u2019?\u201d Wilde says. \u201cI think, for me, I feel the sense of having matured into a place where I understand what I do, and I\u2019m having a lot more fun with it. I feel very relaxed in it. I just hope I get to keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"O livia Wilde would be the first to tell you she knows nothing about farming. But recently, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":890786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134,189166],"class_list":["post-890785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-olivia-wilde"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/890786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}