Olivia Wilde still ‘hurt’ by 2022 coverage of Harry Styles romance and onset drama

While promoting her well-reviewed new marital comedy, “The Invite,” director and actor Olivia Wilde is reflecting on a time when she was at the center of a far more tumultuous press cycle while trying to launch an earlier movie.

Four years ago, her psychological thriller,”Don’t Worry Darling,” briefly soared to the top of the office but not because of stellar reviews. In the weeks before and after the film’s September 2022 release, it became a pop culture sensation due to coverage of Wilde’s relationship with leading man Harry Styles, which reportedly began at the tail end of her relationship to Jason Sudeikis. The tabloid controversy also focused on the film’s tumultuous production during COVID-19 lockdown and on Wilde’s reported conflicts with her leading lady, Florence Pugh, and with Shia LaBeouf, the film’s troubled original star.

As the Daily Mail similarly reported Monday, the hotly anticipated release of “Don’t Worry Darling,” Wilde’s “Stepford Wives”-inspired take on marriage and female agency, was overshadowed by her reported feud with Pugh, as well as by rumors of pay disputes and of how Wilde’s romance with the pop singer made crew members “uncomfortable.”

But in a new interview on “The Louis Theroux Podcast,” the host allows Wilde to suggest that she was a victim of unfair, sensationalist press coverage that “derailed” important conversations she was trying to raise in the film, as the Daily Mail reported.

During the interview, Theroux said to Wilde: “We were talking about how when the film came out it was derailed by publicity. I mean many multidimensional scandals.”

“Your relationship at the time (with Styles) was breaking up,” Theroux continued. “You had a well-publicized relationship with your co-star Harry Styles and, there was a kind of a misogynistic dimension to a lot of the coverage of the drama, the fallout.”

Wilde agreed that the film was hurt by all the coverage of her two-year relationship with Styles, which lasted from 2020 to 2022, and her reported conflicts with her co-stars.

“I think it did hurt the film for sure because we didn’t get to have the conversations about what the film was trying to say, which was a shame because so many people worked so hard to make that film in the depths of COVID,” Wilde said.

“We made the film for $30 million,” Wilde continued, praising the work of the director of photography and production designer who she said made the film, set in an idyllic, Palm Springs-style midcentury community, look “much more expensive” than it was.

“But we never got to talk about that, so I think it hurt the film,” Wilde lamented. “It hurt me for sure, because I was so naive up until that point about the grinder, the garbage disposal that the internet can be.”

‘”So at this point, I have enough of a perspective on it and that allows me to experience it as a fascinating time,” Wilde said with both resignation and acceptance. “It is interesting to witness a tornado from the inside.”

Wilde said that the “conversations” around her new film, co-starring Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz, have been “healing” in comparison to what she dealt with during “Don’t Worry Darling.”

“Well, it’s interesting because this is my first time back into the press cycle since then and I did wonder, would this feel quite traumatizing?” she said.

Wilde also speculated recently that the backlash she received during the production and release of “Don’t Worry Darling” had to do with the “parasocial relationship” that Styles fans have with him.

But industry experts, including Matthew Belloni of the Puck newsletter, said that Wilde was guilty some “unforced errors” as a director and as a celebrity managing her personal brand.

In the year leading up to the film’s release, Wilde, Styles and Sudeikis were the subject of headlines about the messy end of Wilde and Sudeikis’ seven-year relationship. The ex-couple’s nanny, who cared for their two children, sued them in 2023, alleging that they caused her “unbearable stress” when Wilde abruptly moved out of their home in November 2020, while directing Styles in “Don’t Worry Darling.”

A short time later, Wilde informed the “Ted Lasso” star that their relationship was over, according to the nanny and other media accounts. Wilde’s announcement blindsided Sudeikis and left him distraught, the Daily Mail reported. It also was reported that Sudeikis suspected Wilde had begun an affair with Styles on the set of the troubled production. The nanny told the Daily Mail that Sudeikis was “out of control crying,” saying “he was going to get her back and he loved her,” the Daily Mail reported.

Meanwhile, Pugh reportedly was upset that Wilde began seeing Styles while she was still in a relationship with Sudeikis, reports said at the time. Vulture alleged that Pugh and Wilde had a “blowout argument” about three-quarters of the way through production because Pugh had grown “fed up with the director’s frequent, unexplained absences” from the set, allegedly so she could spend time with Styles, as Variety said.

Wilde has emphatically denied that any “screaming match” with Pugh ever occurred. But she didn’t help her case when she gave an interview to Variety during the film’s release, explaining why she replaced LaBeouf with Styles as her leading man. She said she wanted to “protect the cast” from the controversial actor’s “combative energy.”

Wilde’s remarks about LaBeouf prompted the often unpredictable actor to defend himself in a way that prompted more viral headlines. He infamously shared a video online, which showed Wilde begging the actor to return to the project and patronizingly referring to Pugh as “Miss Flo.” Wilde suggested to LaBeouf that Pugh may be the one in need of an attitude adjustment by saying this “might be a bit of a wake-up call for Miss Flo.”