Olivia Wilde 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. “It’s when farmers take a year off and the soil gets turned over,” she explains.
“It becomes full of nutrients again. I heard him describe the artistic need to give the crops some time off and let everything rejuvenate.” She pauses. “After what I went through, I could have just jumped right back into the ring. But I took some time to turn the soil over.”
Clearly, Wilde’s 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). The second was The Invite, 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, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton.
Both 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’t Worry Darling), but she also came back with a vengeance, delivering a one-two punch of the best work of her career. “I think what you’re potentially sensing onscreen in both these roles is a true lack of fucks given,” Wilde says, laughing. “The kind of vulnerability [needed] for The Invite in particular wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t been knocked on my ass.”
Wilde had never seen the original film on which The Invite is based; she’d been sent the script by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, who’d 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, “and letting the dust settle.” Wilde was initially unsure whether she would ever act again, but she’d signed on to do an episode of The Studio, her friend Seth Rogen’s showbiz comedy on Apple TV, and then Araki’s film. Those two roles — one a parody of herself as an egomaniac, the other a sexed-up artist who was like “the devil on my shoulder” (loosely based on Truth or Dare-era Madonna, she says) — helped her get rid of a certain self-consciousness she’d admittedly felt in front of the camera in the past.
Still, when The Invite came to her, Wilde wasn’t interested in starring — 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 “having my Sidney Lumet experience: one room, rehearse the damn thing, and let it evolve as we go along.”
She immediately reached out to Rogen to play Joe, a caustic former musician who’s married to the anxious Angela. Norton, who’d at one point considered remaking The People Upstairs, told Wilde he’d do anything to play the New Age-y neighbor Hawk. For his wife, a therapist named Piña, Wilde thought of Cruz, who she’d long considered to be a first-rate comedian. The fourth part proved trickier. When an actor who’d been circling the role of Angela dropped out, Wilde began pitching various replacement candidates to Rogen and Norton.
“It was sort of my ‘Fuck you’ to every time I felt I’d been forced to be an object of desire.”
“We had a text chain going with the three of us,” Norton says by phone in a separate interview. “[Olivia would say,] ‘What about this person? Isn’t she great? We should check on her!’ Seth and I were like, ‘What’s going on here?’ Then finally we just told her, ‘Olivia, the obvious answer is that you should play Angela. It’s not just the best part of your career — you’re perfect for it.’”
Wilde reluctantly agreed to do double duty, a decision she’s now very glad she made. “I felt … unlocked,” 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 “physically liberating role. It was sort of my ‘Fuck you’ to every time I felt I’d been forced to be an object of desire.” Part of it was that, even with the pressure of wearing two metaphorical hats on one project, “being 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.”
Playing Angela also presented a chance to make The Invite a very personal project — 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’d radically changed The Invite into something that felt less like a remake and more 100 percent their own.
The 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’s 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. “Sharing those conversations in a public forum is something that we still feel a little bit nervous about,” Wilde says. “But the nerves are what make it fun.”
It’s clear that, even if The Invite hadn’t hit as big as it did, it most definitely turned over the soil for Wilde. She’s already prepping her next film, in London; she’s reluctant to go into details, other than to say that, like The Invite, it’s a comedy. And it reflects where she’s at now in her life, as she shifts into what feels like a second or maybe third act.
“Didn’t Miles Davis say, ‘It takes you a long time to learn to sound like yourself’?” Wilde says. “I think, for me, I feel the sense of having matured into a place where I understand what I do, and I’m having a lot more fun with it. I feel very relaxed in it. I just hope I get to keep going.”
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