Olivia Wilde is back in a big way in 2026. The actress and filmmaker has two movies out in coming weeks, first with Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex opposite Cooper Hoffman and then as the director and star of The Invite. As part of a promotional swirl, she sat for a lengthy chat with Alex Cooper on SiriusXM’s Call Her Daddy. The 42-year-old veteran star opened up on a variety of subjects, from the “chaos” of Don’t Worry Darling and the dissolution of her relationship with Jason Sudeikis to that viral red carpet interview and allegations that she’s too thin.

If Wilde’s visibility seems fresh, that’s entirely by design. “Totally intentional,” she told Cooper of taking a step back from public life and not doing any long form interviews in several years. “I felt like I needed to get quiet. I needed to hear myself again, there was so much noise. And it was a very unfamiliar thing to me to be thrust into such chaos. It was not my vibe.”

The chaos she was referring to was the swirl surrounding Don’t Worry Darling in 2022, a time that also happened to coincide with the end of her relationship with Sudeikis and the start of a new one with co-star Harry Styles. Wilde was swarmed by paparazzi and press attention in ways that she had never been before.

“I was suddenly in a tornado and I needed to excuse myself from the tornado and just go and get quiet and hear myself and process, process all of the pain and the lessons that I could find in it,” she explained, adding that she did “a shit ton” of therapy to rebuild herself. “It sounds dramatic, but you know rock bottom is just a place to jump off from. It did feel like a destruction, but there is beauty in destruction because you can rebuild. I needed to take a breather and just say, ‘Wait a minute, what have I learned? Who am I? How can I accept this humbling as a chance to kind of spend the rest of my life as a person who has grown from this?’ Because I have to have grown from it, or else it was for nothing. I’m a very different person than I was three years ago, a much better version of myself because I have just taken the time to process it.”

Though she didn’t mention Styles by name, she did refer to their time together by saying, “There was all this public madness, but my private life was very far from it and very actually kind of wholesome and sweet.” She added, “I had a lot of real joy and love and happiness during that time. It was like a tornado was right outside the door, and if you were inside you were like, it’s so nice. And you open the door and be like, ah, like a fucking like cow and a tractor would fly by.”

Wilde called it “frustrating” to not be able to defend herself against the tabloid storm — going so far as to say that the narrative being painted about her was “fake” courtesy of fake sources — and she had to process those emotions, too.

“The pummeling that I took was so insanely disproportionate, but the thing that I understand, you can get really angry. The thing is like, I get it. Like, shit’s hard. The world is insane. And the escapism of the tabloids is something that is in a way very soothing for people. It’s understandable. And that’s such a weird thing that we all are capable of. I also felt like, no wonder people are filling in the gaps with fiction because they don’t have all the information. … They’re looking for evidence to reinforce the narrative they’ve already created about you.”

Another challenged Wilde faced during the Don’t Worry Darling rollout is when she was served with legal papers while on stage at CinemaCon amid the Sudeikis split. She called it “fucked up” and “incredibly traumatizing” to experience while in front of industry power players.

“That room couldn’t have been higher stress. The people in that room at CinemaCon are … it’s all the studio people. It’s all the people you were trying to impress the most with your work and all the exhibitors, the people at the movie theaters, the people you need to sell your movies, and all the press. And it was like, I cannot fucking believe this is happening to me here. And yet, you know, the crazy thing is, like, once you make it through things like that, you kinda feel like you can make it through anything,” she said, adding that once she made it backstage, she “completely dissolved” into a puddle of tears.

A few months later, she met Tom Cruise, who said to her, “‘Hi, I’m Tom. Fucked up what happened to you in Vegas.’ And I was like, ‘No!’” she said, hoping the story would not have traveled as far as it did.

Wilde hasn’t talked much about her split with Sudeikis since then, but she did tell Cooper when she knew it was over. It was right after her birthday on March 10, 2020. “Jason and I had been having a rough time there for a while,” she explained. “We had a real bumpy, bumpy ride, and we were driving home from my birthday party my friends had had, and I said, ‘Did you give me a birthday present?’ And he said, ‘What would I get you, Olivia? I don’t know you.’ And he wasn’t wrong. We didn’t know each other anymore.”

The realization is a reason she wanted to make The Invite. “You can get to a place in a relationship where you stop engaging in the knowing of each other, in the curiosity about each other, and you find yourself in a place where you’re like, ‘I don’t even know you.’ And that was a point, that was when we realized it was over. And it was fucking tough, and it brought us to the place of like, okay, this is done. We’re gonna end this,” she said.

Another subject that came up during the Call Her Daddy convo was the recent red carpet interview Wilde did with the San Francisco Chronicle that went viral on social media for how thin she appeared on camera. Or, “looking like an actual dead body,” she said, comparing it to the iconic HBO series Tales From the Crypt.

“People were diagnosing me with Graves’ disease. And I was like, ‘Wow.’ Megyn Kelly did an entire segment about how much I looked dead. I was like, ‘All right. You’ll do anything to not talk about eliminating the Equal Rights Amendment or the Voting Rights Act.’ But I was really like, ‘This is undeniably hilarious,’” she explained. “I was there promoting my movie. I’m there as a director. I’m so proud. It’s almost like the internet doesn’t know how to talk about a woman. It’s like there are two levers and they’re like, ‘men in your life’ and ‘body.’ And they’re like, ‘Uh, oh, she’s speaking. OK, voice? Voice? But men. Body. Body. Men. Body.’ And you’re like, ‘You could also talk about other things’ I mean, on that one, I’ll hand it to them, that picture was so crazy. Like, I, too, would’ve been like, ‘Is she okay?’