Olivia Wilde Hit Bottom. Here’s How She Bounced Back.

Magazine|Olivia Wilde Hit Bottom. Here’s How She Bounced Back.

When the actor-director Olivia Wilde was last in the public eye, around the time of her 2022 dystopian thriller, “Don’t Worry Darling,” things weren’t going very well. Wilde had to deal with the twin fallout of decidedly mixed critical reaction and a harsh wave of tabloid attention. The film was plagued by reports of feuding between Wilde and her star, Florence Pugh. Wilde was also hounded online for her relationship, which has since ended, with the pop star Harry Styles, who played a supporting role in the movie. If that wasn’t enough, the press cycle for “Don’t Worry Darling” brought with it continuing scrutiny over her 2020 breakup with her longtime partner, Jason Sudeikis, with whom she has two children. This year, though, it has all been very different.

“The Invite,” a painfully perceptive domestic sex comedy that Wilde, who is 42, directed and co-starred in, has been one of the year’s sleeper hits. She followed that up by playing, to delicious effect, a sexually domineering and manipulative art-world star in the director Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex.” And she’s capping her year off with a small but scene-stealing role as an angrily spurned lover in the upcoming “Behemoth!” starring Pedro Pascal and directed by Tony Gilroy. I spoke to Wilde last month in London, where she was prepping her next directorial effort, a Christmas comedy called “Naughty,” about what it’s like to hit a low and how she so dramatically turned things around in her work and life.

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I was thinking about the three roles you played this year in “The Invite,” “I Want Your Sex” and “Behemoth!” All these characters are tightly wound, and I wondered if being a director has changed how you see yourself as an actor. Being a director freed me up to not feel pressure to be the ideal ingénue growing into the idealized female character in any film. I now choose roles from a much more curious place. But I hadn’t put together that these three characters are extremely high-strung in different ways. My character in “I Want Your Sex” felt like she was on the opposite end of the spectrum of femininity as my character in “The Invite.” They’re both movies dealing with the idea of sex and sexuality and desire and eroticism from two completely different perspectives.