{"id":740779,"date":"2026-07-03T11:36:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T11:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/740779\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T11:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T11:36:08","slug":"i-feel-both-thrilled-and-ruined-by-this-olivia-wilde-and-edward-norton-on-making-sex-comedy-the-invite-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/740779\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I feel both thrilled and ruined by this\u2019: Olivia Wilde and Edward Norton on making sex comedy The Invite | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week, Edward Norton<\/a> took a night flight from New York to London and felt so dreadful the next day he decided to get a massage. \u201cI hadn\u2019t had one in such a long time,\u201d he says, \u201cand I almost started crying. You\u2019re like: \u2018Oh! Ah!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He has heard similar sounds from cinemas screening his new movie, The Invite, which is about the devastating impact of marriage on your sex life. \u201cPeople are almost tearful. They\u2019re like: \u2018I haven\u2019t had a good, adult laugh that made me feel seen in a long time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He grins, all tan and relaxation. \u201cMost people feel alone inside the dysfunction of their relationship \u2013 worried it\u2019s only the two of you having these problems. Universality is a relief. It lets you forgive yourself a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next to him nods Olivia Wilde<\/a>, his co-star and director. \u201cMy favourite audience laugh,\u201d she says, \u201cis that which seems to say: \u2018I thought I was the only one!\u2019 It\u2019s like ha-ha-ha-aaah; a little bit of a moan. When you hear yourself laugh at something that feels revealing, and then someone else does so too, the quiet shame you felt is immediately relieved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bed death \u2026 Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen as a married couple in The Invite. Photograph: Adam Newport-Berra\/PA<\/p>\n

Seeing and feeling seen by The Invite is cathartic. It\u2019s also far from flattering. Wilde plays Angela, a frustrated artist married to failed musician Joe (Seth Rogen). They share a 12-year-old but not much else. When their daughter is on a sleepover, Angela asks the upstairs neighbours \u2013 smooth former firefighter Hawk (Norton) and his girlfriend, Pi\u00f1a, a therapist played by Pen\u00e9lope Cruz \u2013 down for supper. It is not a spoiler to say the evening does not go well, or as predicted. Think Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with extra pegging.<\/p>\n

Of the four characters, only Pi\u00f1a is someone you might actually aspire to be, probably because she is a proxy for the film\u2019s consultant: Belgium-born, Manhattan-based psychotherapist Esther Perel. Pi\u00f1a voices many of Perel\u2019s key theories \u2013 most pertinently that all relationships end but can sometimes be rebooted with the same person. One Perel idea, which isn\u2019t spoken aloud but seems to hover significantly, is that \u201cbed death\u201d is an inevitable byproduct of the American dream.<\/p>\n

Yes, says Wilde keenly. \u201cIt\u2019s that American sense of duty: I have begun this marriage, I will complete it, I will muscle through. The puritanical roots of our culture mean it\u2019s not only shameful to value pleasure, but also to admit defeat.\u201d<\/p>\n

For women in such a society, she says, there remains \u201ca sense of achievement in marriage. You have signed a contract that will keep you safe and feels like success. Pleasure and your continuing exploration of it is secondary to keeping the family unit intact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilde and Norton each have two children; she with her ex-partner, Jason Sudeikis, he with his wife of 14 years, producer Shauna Robertson. \u201cWhen one sees a family with a small child in France,\u201d Wilde continues, paraphrasing Perel, \u201cthe suggestion is that those people are having sex, which is what led to this child. In America, it\u2019s like: those people are not having sex because they have a small child. That inherently signals the end of sexual exploration and the focus around a very different sense of femininity much more rooted in duty and nurture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I have that feeling that if I never made anything else, I\u2019d be OK.\u2019 Photograph: Linda Nylind\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

The Invite feels very US-specific, despite being based on a Spanish play that has already been turned into movies in Italy, Switzerland, France and South Korea. That\u2019s because as well as the film being set in San Francisco and channelling California\u2019s favourite sexologist, the cast workshopped the script for a fortnight with screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack.<\/p>\n

Adding their own hangups to the mix was easy and unexposing, says Norton. \u201cThere was a lot of pre-existing comfort and trust\u201d \u2013 they already knew each other; he and Rogen previously collaborated on food orgy animation Sausage Party<\/a>, with which The Invite shares some filthy DNA. There was a lot of improvisation: very funny jokes, slapstick, even a devastating speech in which Hawk explains the origins of his name. Norton remains amazed Wilde let him wing that bit. \u201cDirectors just don\u2019t say: \u2018Don\u2019t tell me what this key moment is going to be.\u2019\u201d Especially if you\u2019re shooting on 35mm. \u201cActually, I\u2019m kind of amazed that Seth was OK with it. Seth is a very methodical and mechanical craftsperson.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than a year on, Norton, 56, still seems buzzing from the shoot. He keeps creasing up and sharing his favourite lines. He talks about getting \u201cinto a flow state\u201d and the \u201cexuberant feelings\u201d as they twigged it was all coming together. A jazz quartet metaphor gets an airing. He has made more than 50 movies, he says, but this was the first filmed chronologically (on a single set, over about three weeks).<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would never, ever have had that arc if it had been shot out of sequence. We would have been much more cautious. It had a really profound effect on the way the story layered up toward its finale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilde beams at him, her striking, angular Bambi face glowing. \u201cI feel both thrilled and ruined by this experience,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause I don\u2019t know when I can possibly expect to have another one like this. To have a group of people so in sync. I do have that feeling that if I never made anything else, I\u2019d be OK.\u201d<\/p>\n

Odd couples \u2026 Wilde, Rogen, Cruz and Norton in The Invite. Photograph: Black Bear\/PA<\/p>\n

The Invite is unlikely to be her final film. Following its premiere at Sundance in January, it was sold to A24 for $12m (\u00a39m) after a bidding war and is now a critical hit, a commercial sensation and an awards contender. It trumps even the ecstatic reception afforded Wilde\u2019s 2019 directorial debut, Booksmart<\/a>, and nearly wipes the memory of her follow-up, Don\u2019t Worry Darling<\/a> (2022), which pleased neither reviewers, audiences nor Harry Styles fans (Wilde and her co-star dated for a couple of years; she has been withering about the bleak media scrutiny).<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a believer in the idea of using storytelling to experience emotions that no amount of therapy can unearth completely,\u201d says Wilde. \u201cI was surprised by my own performance, because things were sort of erupting from me that I didn\u2019t plan for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among these was the moment Angela calls herself a \u201cstupid fucking cunt\u201d before reassuring Hawk that she\u2019s fine; it\u2019s just her inner monologue. That, says Wilde, was a roundabout tribute to the late Diane Keaton, to whom the movie is dedicated.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was probably the most self-effacing person I\u2019ve ever encountered. Certainly within so many of her great roles she had this immediate awareness of oneself in a way that is brutal and so vulnerable.\u201d They played mother and daughter on 2015\u2019s Christmas with the Coopers, and Angela inherits much from Keaton, just as the film mines Woody Allen\u2019s best bickery comedies and the prickliest Mike Nichols.<\/p>\n

The \u201ccunt\u201d line, then, is the sweary heir of Keaton\u2019s \u201cwhat a jerk\u201d ramble in Annie Hall\u2019s post-tennis scene<\/a> \u2013 a scene, says Norton, that not only includes the first \u201cla-di-da\u201d, and the first sight of Keaton\u2019s classic hat-tie-waistcoat-slacks outfit (elements of which Wilde has today adopted), but also \u201ca generational moment in that it was the first person doing the inner monologue, saying the quiet part out loud\u201d.<\/p>\n

Pen\u00e9lope Cruz as Pi\u00f1a and Olivia Wilde as Angela. Photograph: Adam Newport-Berra\/PA<\/p>\n

The Invite solicits its audience to speak the unspoken and \u2013 Keaton\u2019s killer gift \u2013 stay spontaneous. Resistance to both, says Norton, is partly the fault \u201cof what these things\u201d \u2013 he jabs at his phone \u2013 \u201care doing to us psychosexually\u201d. There\u2019s only one moment involving tech in the movie, and it\u2019s awful. That absence adds to the movie\u2019s air of nostalgia, as does its central setup: a hastily arranged knees-up of near-strangers. \u201cNow, our social worlds are heavily curated,\u201d says Wilde. \u201cYou gather in groups of like-minded people. You screen your date before you meet them. You already know everything about them. The idea, today, of collision with the unknown is completely foreign.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is also, she adds, scary. Tech tells us we don\u2019t need other people. \u201cAnd we\u2019re still unwinding from Covid, which told us to fear the other, and embrace isolationism. Intimacy involves risk, friction \u2013 all these things that now we are completely sanitising our lives of.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plus, says Wilde, warming further, social media stifles exactly the evolution needed to keep relationships perky. \u201cPeople have become brands. Everyone has defined said brand. I wonder if having put a record out there of who you are, and what your interests are, means people are giving themselves less permission to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she was younger, every new stage \u2013 high school, college, a different city \u2013 was an opportunity for reinvention. \u201cI hate the idea that people feel less open to that because they\u2019ve documented a published record that they will be held against as evidence of their former selves.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m a believer in the idea of using storytelling to experience emotions.\u2019 Photograph: Linda Nylind\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Wilde\u2019s first wedding was at 19, to an Italian aristocrat, on a school bus with two witnesses. Today, she is less sold on that sort of contract. \u201cThere is this sense of: \u2018How dare you change! You said at 24 you would like this kind of life and now you\u2019re 44. How dare you want different things!\u2019 The most successful relationships I\u2019ve observed have been people who seem to really be interested in the other person as they are today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Settling is shameful, says Pi\u00f1a in the film: people exist on crumbs, forgetting they deserve more. This is lifted pretty wholesale from Perel and is a philosophy whose roots the psychotherapist has put down to being raised by Holocaust survivors \u2013 a group she divides into \u201cthose who didn\u2019t die, and those who came back to life\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis sense of having one life and how you better be living it authentically is absolutely what seems to drive her,\u201d says Wilde. It\u2019s curious, I say, that Perel\u2019s spiritual ancestor, the much-loved US sex therapist Dr Ruth Westheimer, was also the daughter of European Jews sent to concentration camps \u2013 though both of her parents were murdered.<\/p>\n

Norton nods into his coffee. Did I know, he says, that Perel\u2019s husband, Jack Saul, is also a therapist and specialises in post-traumatic stress disorder? \u201cI talked about this with Esther,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re living in global trauma right now. We literally have genocide being live-streamed. Mechanised armies attacking civilian populations in Ukraine and Sudan. Masked, fascist goons shooting American citizens on the streets. This is the uber-text of what we\u2019re getting mainlined into us. And trauma and violence and brutality are suppressive to eroticism.\u201d<\/p>\n

So the Invite isn\u2019t just froth, he says \u2013 it\u2019s a tonic. \u201cA kind of medicine. People feel unbelievably disconnected from their erotic selves in times like these. You feel bad about whingeing about your own lack of activation on an emotional, psychosexual level because the whole world is telling you: you\u2019ve gotta just survive this horror.\u201d<\/p>\n

He and Wilde look at each other and sigh. Time for another massage, perhaps.<\/p>\n

The Invite is in cinemas now<\/p>\n

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