Olivia Wilde Wants Her Movies to Shine, Not Her Exes

When you’re trying to talk about your work, the last thing you want is for the conversation to veer into your personal life. That’s exactly where Olivia Wilde finds herself as she heads into a busy summer with two films releasing before the end of July.

The 42-year-old director and actress is hoping—earnestly, it seems—that the press tour for her upcoming projects will focus on her creative output rather than her dating history. She told The Cut in an interview published Wednesday, June 24, that having yet another project overshadowed by her relationships would be genuinely frustrating.“It would make me very sad if yet another project I put so much work into was eclipsed by that,”she said, adding that the media’s fixation on her personal life is hardly a shock anymore.

The elephant in the room, of course, is Harry Styles. The two dated for nearly two years before splitting in November 2022, and while their relationship was kept relatively private—they never went Instagram official or walked a red carpet together—it’s impossible to separate their names from her 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling, where Styles starred alongside her as director. It’s a dynamic that’s become all too familiar for Wilde: her professional achievements getting tangled up with tabloid narratives.

This summer, she’s starring in I Want Your Sex, playing a manipulative, seductive artist opposite Cooper Hoffman. Director Gregg Araki praised her fearlessness for the role, and Wilde herself seemed energized by the prospect of leaning into something bold and comedic.“That’s exactly what I want to do right now,”she told Araki. Meanwhile, she’s also navigating motherhood—she shares two kids with ex Jason Sudeikis and has been thoughtful about keeping their lives out of the spotlight, hoping to shield them from the online noise until they’re old enough to understand it’s just noise.

The broader issue here is worth sitting with: how much should personal relationships define or overshadow a creator’s work? Wilde isn’t asking for her exes to disappear from the narrative—she’s spoken warmly about her time with Harry Styles, calling it“loving and wonderful and joyful.”She’s simply asking for space to be judged on her merit as a filmmaker and actor. It’s a reasonable request that seems, unfortunately, too much to ask of celebrity culture right now.