It’s tea time in London and Olivia Wilde is talking about the O word. No, not the Oscars, but her approach to the sex scenes in her new film, Don’t Worry Darling.  “Men don’t come to this movie,” she declares over a cucumber sandwich and scoff at Claridge’s, a few blocks from Buckingham Palace.  “Only women here!” 

In Wilde’s second directorial outing after 2019’s indie high school coming-of-age story “Booksmart,” Florence Pugh and Harry Styles star as a married couple living in a quaint, experimental utopia called Victory.  Pugh plays Alice, a “Mad Men” housewife whose reality begins to crack, revealing disturbing truths beneath her seemingly perfect world.  When the trailer for the sci-fi thriller was released in May, social media was buzzing about Stiles’ character, Jack, taking Alice down over a dining room table. 

“Female pleasure, the best versions of it you see these days, is in queer films,” says Wilde.  “Why are we more comfortable with female pleasure when it’s two women in the film?  In heterosexual scenes in the film, the focus on men as recipients of pleasure is almost ubiquitous.’ 

Wilde, 38, sees the world through a post-feminist lens, and the women in her films drive the action on their own, without the help of men. 

“It’s all about immediacy and extreme passion for each other,” Wilde says of the film’s complicated central relationship.  “The impractical nature of their sex speaks to their wild desire for each other.  I think it’s integral to the story itself and how the audience is meant to connect with them.  My first discussions with the cast were about how the audience should buy into the fantasy.” 
								Zoe McConnell for Variety

Wilde, whose acting credits include everything from the medical drama “House” to Ron Howard’s “Rush” and Clint Eastwood’s “Richard Jewell,” wears a black T-shirt, baggy jeans and hooded Converse low-tops.  On this July afternoon, she came to Claridge’s straight from a pottery class, dried clay in her hands when she arrived.  “People were looking at me in the bathroom like I shouldn’t be here,” says Wilde, seated at a back corner table in the tea room, where she slips unnoticed among the sea of ​​pastel-bejeweled guests in trumpets and pearls.  With no makeup except for a smudge of eyeliner left over, Wilde looks more like a film student than one of Hollywood’s up-and-coming directors.  Appearing alone with no security, she doesn’t look like someone who constantly avoids the paparazzi on the cobbled streets of London — where she lives with her two children, Otis, 8, and Daisy, 5 — she’s one of the most talked-about celebrities of the moment. 

“It’s harder for women to get a second chance at directing,” says Wilde, acknowledging that “Booksmart” was a critical triumph but by no means a box office smash, earning $25 million on a $6 million budget. .  “Fewer people will invest in a woman’s second film than a man,” she says.  “I was so lucky.  My movie didn’t make a billion dollars.  It struck a nerve enough of the cultural fact that they allowed me to have another chance.  I really feel, at this point, that I’ve earned the right to say I’m a director.” 

The stakes are indeed high for “Don’t Worry Darling,” which debuts at the Venice Film Festival on September 5.  On the 23rd, it will elevate Wilde to a short list of top female directors—and an even shorter list of female actresses-turned-directors (Elizabeth Banks, Jodie Foster, Greta Gerwig, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Hall, Angelina Jolie, Regina King, Barbra Streisand and … that’s about it).  Warner Bros., the studio behind the film, could use an original hit outside of the realm of comic book movies, especially since the company, following the Discovery merger, is going through plenty of public turmoil. 

And for better or worse, Don’t Worry My Love created no shortage of headlines.  It’s the play where Wilde met Styles, now her boyfriend.  It’s also linked to an incident in April at CinemaCon where Wilde was served with custody papers by her ex-fiancé, “Ted Lasso” actor Jason Sudeikis, as she took the stage in Las Vegas to promote the film to exhibitors.

At the time, Sudeikis said in a statement that he had “no prior knowledge” of the ambush and would “never condone serving it in such an inappropriate manner.”  Since then, a judge has granted Wilde’s request to dismiss Sudeikis’ petition asking Otis and Daisy to eventually stay with him in New York. 

“It was my workplace,” Wilde says, referring to the CinemaCon incident without naming Sudeikis, with whom he was in a relationship from 2011 to 2020. “In any other workplace, it would have been considered assault.  It was really upsetting.  It shouldn’t have been.  There was a huge security breach, which is really scary.  The hurdles you had to go through to get into this room with lots of badges, as well as special tests for COVID that had to be done days in advance, which gave you wristbands that were necessary to gain access to the event — that was something that it required foresight.” 

CinemaCon was supposed to be a professional milestone for Wilde, who was to screen footage from her film.  She didn’t waste a moment when she was interrupted by the mysterious envelope — she just continued her presentation.  “I hated that this nastiness was distracting from the work of so many different people and the studio I was representing up there,” he says.  “Trying to sabotage that was really mean.  But I had a job to do.  I’m not easily distracted.”  He adds, “But, you know, unfortunately, it wasn’t something that was a complete surprise to me.  I mean, there’s a reason I left that relationship.” 

Wilde pauses, trying to summon the right words.  He states, for the record, that he is splitting custody.  the kids go back and forth between her and Sudeikis week after week.  (Wilde first moved to London a few years ago with her family because Sudeikis is filming Ted Lasso there and now splits her time between the UK and Los Angeles.) When Wilde is with her children , is entirely with her children, she says.  She makes breakfast every morning, never misses bedtime and takes them to school herself.  “It’s my world,” he says.  “They are my best friends.” 

Returning to CinemaCon, Wilde says, “The only people who suffered were my children, because they would have to see this and never have to know that it happened.  For me, it was horrible, but the victims were an 8- and 5-year-old child, and that’s really sad.  I chose to be an actor.  I willingly entered the limelight.  But it’s not something my kids asked for.  And when my children are drawn into it, it’s deeply painful.” 
								Zoe McConnell for Variety

After ‘Booksmart’, Wilde was offered another comedy to direct.  But he had other plans.  In fact, he had started thinking about an idea long before ‘Booksmart’ came along – in fact, when Donald Trump took office.  “What are we going to do?”  he remembers thinking. 

“I was looking for a way to tell a story about what happens when someone is willing to sacrifice a system that serves them to do the right thing,” Wilde says while eating an egg salad sandwich.  (“This country loves mayonnaise, doesn’t it?” she says, polishing off half the plate.) “I’ve also been thinking a lot about my place in society as someone who might rage against the patriarchy, but in many ways fully benefits from the.” 

Wilde decided to trust her instincts and turned down a number of comedy scripts.  “Science fiction has a long history in cinema of allowing political issues to be expressed through entertaining narratives,” he says.  “I don’t enjoy or get inspired by stories that oversimplify feminism.  It’s much more complicated.”  At the same time, Wilde didn’t want her next film to feel “preachy” in any way. 

She got the idea for her play from a spec script by writers Carey and Shane Van Dyke that made it onto the 2019 Black List. The story, which became “Don’t Worry My Love,” is set in an idyllic yet sinister town in the 1950s . 

“It felt like I was adapting a great piece of IP,” says Wilde.  “It allowed for a really inspiring jumping off point.”  She brought in Katie Silberman, her “Booksmart” partner, to rewrite what became the current script.  In preparation, the duo returned to Betty’s Friedan’s 1963 classic “The Feminine Mystique” more than a few times. 

They also went down the rabbit hole of what Wilde calls “the disenfranchised white male internet world,” searching 4chan, studying YouTube algorithms, researching groupthink perpetuated by social media and incel leaders .  “I have a sick fascination with cults,” says Wilde. 

When the project was first announced in 2019, one magazine touted it as a psychological thriller “for the Time’s Up era.”  The film sparked an intense bidding war, with 18 studios and streaming services vying to land the field.  In the end, New Line Cinema won the auction.  Wilde reveals that she chose the Warner Bros.-owned studio because it was the only one that promised her an exclusive theatrical release. 

“Suddenly I had the opportunity to decide what would be the best house for us,” says Wilde.  “I wanted to work with the place that would not only allow me to make the film on the scale it deserved, but to cast the people I wanted and release it in…