Olivia Wilde Shared Rare insight into the public scrutiny she faced around the release of Don’t Worry Darling and how advice from Pamela Anderson helped her navigate that time.
When it came to public scrutiny, Olivia Wilde didn’t need to worry, darling.
That’s because she had Pamela Anderson, no stranger to being on the receiving end of attention, in her corner. Nearly four years after her movie Don’t Worry Darling became the subject of a media frenzy for alleged behind-the-scenes drama—not to mention her public breakup from Jason Sudeikis—the film’s director looked back on that time, detailing how her experience at the center of a public controversy led her to seek out the Baywatch star.
“This sounds so crazy, but after I saw the documentary about Pamela Anderson, I reached out to her, and I was like, ‘Yo, respect, just want to say big fan, respect,’” Wilde recalled on the June 17 episode of Call Her Daddy. “She was aware of some of the s--t that I was going through, and she wrote to me, and she said the most rebellious thing you can do is stay soft. Don't let it harden you.”
At the time of Don’t Worry Darling’s release, Anderson was also revisiting the scandals she’d faced during her rise to fame in the ‘90s in her 2023 Netflix documentary Pamela: A Love Story.
For Wilde, that show of support from Anderson prompted an important message—one she passed along to Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper—about not always needing to face the public with a certain level of stoicism.
“I think staying soft and vulnerable, and being comfortable saying, ‘You guys, it's that f--king hurts, and it's not real, and it's not true,’’ the House alum advised. “Don't feel like you have to stay so strong for us, we know you're strong, it's okay to be soft if you need to.”
After all, amid rumors that she and Don’t Worry Darling star Florence Pugh were feuding—not to mention an alleged spitting incident between Chris Pine and Harry Styles—Wilde felt compelled to just keep moving forward during the “f--king bananas” time.
“I’ve never felt more disconnected from the person that people were talking about,” the mom of two explained. “It was also very strange to see complete fiction traded as fact.”
And it was a complicated experience for her having to avoid the drama, especially as the speculation about what was going on behind the scenes only spiraled.
“I wanted to be like, ‘Can I just talk to people?’” Wilde admitted. “Can I just go and say like, ‘That's not true?’ And it was like no, that won't help. And that was really hard.”
It also hurt to see the film's whole crew dragged into the mess. "I felt frustrated that I couldn't defend myself, but it also felt like, "Okay, it's not about you, just get the movie out,'" she recalled. "And the pummeling that I took was so insanely disproportionate."
Now, she sees the way in which the approach she as advised to follow—an experience she noted caused her to be cast “in the soap opera of the tabloids as the villain”—only made the situation worse.
“I think that my own attempt to be strong and to kind of like rise above it,” the Booksmart director acknowledged, “in a way came off as inauthentic.”
