How Olivia Wilde Recovered from the Don’t Worry Darling Storm with The Invitation

Four years after the media disaster of Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde returns to directing with The Invitation, a twisting and wicked behind-closed-doors comedy about a couple in crisis and their libertine neighbors. A necessarily introspective film where she shares the poster with Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, and which guided her towards a form of appeasement. Encounter.

Even in her wildest nightmares, Olivia Wilde could never have imagined the extent to which promoting Don’t worry darling was going to go off the rails. It’s 2022 and its sci-fi thriller on female alienation, not even released yet, is fueling excessive media hype for all the wrong reasons: falling out between Florence Pugh and Shia LaBeouf (the latter was completely fired from the project), rumor of tension between the director and her main actress, hypothetical spitting of Harry Styles on Chris Pine at the Venice Film Festival, gossip about the couple formed by Wilde and Styles…

The final blow comes at CinemaCon in Las Vegas where Wilde, in the process of charming theater operators, receives on stage an envelope containing legal documents related to her divorce from Jason Sudeikis and the custody of their two children. Atmosphere. Very quickly, the film itself is drowned in this noise and the conversation only concerns the side effects. What was supposed to be a celebration of Olivia Wilde as a filmmaker has become a freak show, and Don’t Worry Darling will never recover.

So the return (in front and) behind the camera of the American with The Invitationa small production unlike the previous one, questions: did she think she would have to climb the mountain again to prove her worth in Hollywood, or, on the contrary, did she decide to free herself from the insane pressure surrounding her comeback? “I think it’s more the second option”she explains to us serenely by telephone, a few months later………..