Actress-director Olivia Wilde’s romance with singer Harry Styles—the star of her new movie Don’t Worry Darling—has been dissected a million ways.
But in a new interview with Vanity Fair, Wilde wants to make one thing very clear: She was fully broken up with fiancé Jason Sudeikis when she first got involved with the floppy-haired former boy-band heartthrob.
“The complete horseshit idea that I left Jason for Harry is completely inaccurate,” she told the magazine.
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“Our relationship was over long before I met Harry. Like any relationship that ends, it doesn’t end overnight. Unfortunately, Jason and I had a very bumpy road, and we officially dissolved the relationship towards the beginning of the pandemic.
“We were raising two kids during lockdown, so we co-parented through that time. Once it became clear that cohabitating was no longer beneficial for the children, it became the responsible thing to not, because we could be better parents as friends who live in different houses.”
Wilde and Sudeikis revealed in November 2020 that they had split up. Rumors that she was dating Styles emerged in January 2021, but it wasn’t until almost a year later that publicly acknowledged it.
Sudeikis infamously had Wilde served with child-custody papers while she was on stage at CinemaCon. While he has denied knowledge of the timing, she believes it was done to humiliate her.
“So many people were shocked on my behalf,” she told Vanity Fair. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t that shocked. There’s a reason that I didn’t stay in that relationship. Unfortunately, that was consistent with my experience of the relationship. So I was probably the least shocked. But I was also deeply saddened by it—and disturbed by it in lots of ways.
“I know it took an extraordinary amount of energy [for the server] to get in that room. It took a tremendous amount of forethought. And I will tell you, there are so many other ways to do that. I am not someone who lives in hiding. If that experience hadn’t been public, I never would have spoken of it, because I never would want my kids to know that happened. Unfortunately, they will know that happened.”
Incredibly, Wilde’s relationship with Styles and the bad blood between her and Sudeikis seems almost tame compared to the drama that has been swirling around Don’t Worry Darling in recent weeks—from clashing accounts of how Shia LaBoeuf was bounced from the movie and replaced with Styles, to Florence Pugh’s apparent war with Wilde, and the bizarre episode at the Venice Film Festival in which Styles was accused of spitting at Chris Pine (Pine says he did not).
