The reasons to worry, darling? The limit doesn’t exist.
Now we’re talking about spitting on multiple continents. Harry Styles just spoke about it from the stage of his Madison Square Garden residency on Wednesday night. The Don’t Worry Darling star referenced major drama from the chaotic press tour for his new film with reported girlfriend and director Olivia Wilde, which now counts “#Spitgate” among its controversies.
“This is our tenth show at Madison Square Garden. It’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful to be back in New York. I just popped very quickly to Venice to spit on Chris Pine,” he said—appearingly in jest—at his most recent New York concert. “But fret not, we’re back!”
The messiest press tour for a major movie that I can remember—perhaps in my whole career?—has not slowed down now that the film had its drama-filled premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Just when one might think it’s hit its last twist—an entire news cycle attempting to decipher whether or not Harry Styles spit on Chris Pine while on camera at a sophisticated and very public film festival—it’s careening around another hairpin turn.
An entire airplane’s worth of baggage flurried down onto the premiere for Don’t Worry Darling last week. Wilde directed the film, and claimed to have fired the original star, Shia LaBeouf, for bad behavior. LaBeouf provided “receipts” to Variety in the form of emails and a video message sent from Wilde herself that indicated this was not true, that she wanted LaBeouf to continue with the film. In the video, Wilde alludes that the issue lay with Oscar-nominated star Florence Pugh—or “Miss Flo” as Wilde insultingly referred to her.
There is an uncountable number of rumors swirling about what was responsible for the discord on the set, including that Wilde hiring Harry Styles as a replacement for LaBeouf and then beginning a romantic relationship with him made people uncomfortable.
Whatever happened, whether it was on set or now after all this drama in the trades, Pugh is clearly unhappy. The only publicity she agreed to do was to walk the red carpet at the Venice premiere, skipping the typically mandatory press conference as well as future premiere events. The staging of the standing order for that red carpet photo, by the way, must have enlisted every publicist in Italy.
That her stylists captioned Instagram posts “Miss Flo” and, later, wore shirts monogrammed “Miss Flo” underlined that Pugh was not just aware of the comments made by Wilde and LaBeouf, but clearly perturbed by it. She has a mischievous smirk in the photos. It appears that she is, and perhaps rightfully, gloating over the drama.
But #SpitGate? Who expected that to continue for another round of headlines?
There is video of Styles arriving at his seat at the Don’t Worry Darling premiere and, from multiple angles, appearing to (maybe, perhaps... it’s entirely unclear) hock a loogie at Pine, who is seated next to Wilde. The attention paid to the clip reached such a fever pitch that Pine’s publicist released a statement denying it.
Maybe it really didn’t happen. Maybe Styles was just being cheeky and addressing the elephant in the room—which, when you’re headlining Madison Square Garden and this is the news you need to acknowledge, is a mighty big elephant. He probably was! But here we are, at Round 437 of this drama. The film doesn’t come out until Sept. 23. I’m already so tired.
