Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | June 25, 2026
There is a new Olivia Wilde profile over at The Cut timed to the release of her new film, The Invite. Four years after the collective internet lost its absolute goddamned mind, Wilde is finally allowed to speak.
The short version? It was all BS. She never had a screaming match on her set. She was never missing-in-action. None of it was true. But when she wanted to clear her name back in 2022, the PR machinery gave her the classic Hollywood gag order: Don’t say a f***ing word. Just go out there and smile. So she smiled. And four years later, we finally get the correction.
Which begs the question: Were we fair to her?
Mostly, when it came to the actual work. I said it then and I’ll say it now: Wilde was the only person who actually bothered to show up and answer for that movie. Chris Pine practically fled Jimmy Kimmel’s couch, and Florence Pugh effectively ghosted the entire press campaign. Wilde was also entirely correct that no male director is ever forced to answer for on-set chaos while his actors get to skate by as blameless auteurs. (Ahem, David O. Russell.) The whisper campaign implying she wasn’t even the one directing the movie was hogwash, and profoundly sexist. Given that The Invite is currently sitting at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, I think that argument is officially dead and buried.
But here is where I refuse to completely sign on to the “We’re So Sorry, Olivia” redemption petition: The internet didn’t go completely feral over Don’t Worry Darling purely because of misogyny. We went feral because it was, objectively speaking, magnificent gossip.
A director who is also starring, who is also dating her twenty-something pop-star lead, who is also fresh off a separation from her beloved sitcom-star ex, who is also actively at war with said ex in the press, all culminating in the spit-gate-adjacent meltdown in Venice? That is not a smear campaign. That was just a lot of very true things stacked on top of each other, and in some cases, Wilde lit the match herself.
And look, we don’t get to play the innocent bystander here. I covered the nanny leak. I wrote an entire post clutching my pearls about how messed it up it was to air a celebrity’s dirty laundry … and then I proceeded to relay every single sordid detail of that laundry for your reading pleasure. That is the dark magic of this beat: you get to feel deeply principled about the leak while spending six paragraphs capitalizing on the contents. So when Wilde points out in The Cut that the only real victims here were two kids who will one day grow up and read all of this? Yeah, we helped build that digital archive.
Should we have cared at all? A little, sure. The world is actively on fire and we crave low-stakes celebrity drama; the 2022 Venice Film Festival was basically pure, uncut internet crack.
The sin is forgetting that there were actual human beings trapped inside the soap opera. “Miss Flo” is a real working actor; the “Cruella” edit we gave Olivia was a real woman’s reputation; and those custody papers served on a literal stage were about a five- and eight-year-old child. We were obsessed because it was the perfect, frivolous story. It just wasn’t frivolous for the people who had to live through it.
Has time erased the stink? Mostly, but not because she re-litigated the past. It’s because she went out and made something new that is actually great, and Hollywood is reliably terrible at staying mad at people who deliver hits. Don’t Worry Darling still wasn’t a good movie. Olivia Wilde is still a talented filmmaker (Booksmart is one of the best coming-of-age films of the last decade). Both of those things were true the entire time.
She had to live inside that hell. We just got to watch. In retrospect, we maybe enjoyed the watching a little more than it probably deserved.
