Olivia Wilde is very skilled at two things: highlighting her excellent cheekbones and digging her second feature film’s grave herself. Don’t Worry Darling is known better for its incredibly messy, incredibly delectable behind-the-scenes drama than the awful film that came out of it. Unfortunately, its director carries much of the blame for that tasty, reputation-killing gossip—and she just won’t stop making it worse.
In a new Elle magazine feature, published nearly two months after the film’s disastrous Venice Film Festival premiere, Wilde spews some peak B.S. about the movie. This time, she’s reckoning with the criticism, of which there was a lot. (Don’t Worry Darling is sitting at a cool 38-percent “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes.) The culprit for much of the film’s poor reception? Everyone’s fixation on its sex scenes.
“I was interested in acknowledging female pleasure that doesn’t come from penetration,” she says first, by way of explaining why the only sex we see is oral sex, performed on a woman (Florence Pugh) by a man (Harry Styles). She goes on to compliment her boyfriend Styles’ new movie My Policeman for getting sex right; as a queer film, it is inherently better at showing realistic pleasure.
This is well and good; I’m a big fan of female pleasure. Where Wilde goes off the rails is in her next comments, presented here in full:
“It’s interesting, because Florence [Pugh] very wisely pointed out that a lot of attention has been given to the sex scenes. And I think she’s so right. I completely agree with her that it’s overshadowing everything else that the movie’s about, which is so interestingly ironic because one of the uses of sex in Victory is as a tool of distraction. When Florence pointed that out that this film is so much bigger and better than just the sex scenes, I was so happy that she said that because I feel the same way.”
The only logical response to this is: Wait, what? The person talking the most about Don’t Worry Darling’s decidedly unsexy sex scenes was Wilde herself, in several pre-premiere interviews. Back in December 2021, when all we had was a fairly compelling 11-second teaser to go off, Wilde told Vogue that her mission was for filmgoers to “realize how rarely they see female hunger, and specifically this type of female pleasure.”
Then, in an August 2022 Variety interview, Wilde explained that the sex scenes were “integral to the story itself.” “It’s all about immediacy and extreme passion for one another,” she said about the film’s very horny main characters. And then there was an Associated Press interview in September, in which she suggested she wanted more of the oral sex scene shown in the film’s provocative teaser—but was stopped due to “puritanical” studio practices.
Wilde was the only person involved with the movie to speak about its sex in these ways—or, really, at all. Save for Florence “Miss Flo” Pugh, that is, as the director notes. But all that Pugh said about Don’t Worry Darling’s sex scenes was that it wasn’t worth discussing them. “When [a film is] reduced to your sex scenes, or to watch the most famous man in the world go down on someone, it’s not why we do it. It’s not why I’m in this industry,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in August, a cover story released a mere two weeks before Variety published its interview with Wilde.
The cast and crew of Don’t Worry Darling, Pugh said, were “bigger and better than” the conversation around how titillating the movie was or wasn’t going to be. Cut to: Wilde leaning into the idea that the movie was titillating…but in a feminist way. Or something.
The sheer irony that Wilde refers to in Elle isn’t about how the interest in film’s portrayal of sex doesn’t comport with sex’s function in the film. The irony is that Wilde herself is the one who wouldn’t stop talking up the sex and how uniquely female-focused it was. For Wilde to point out—correctly!—that, in Don’t Worry Darling, men go down on women as a way to manipulate them into ignorant submission isn’t her flipping the bird at audiences and critics. She’s actually looking in a mirror and telling herself to piss off.
It’s comical, really, how bad of a job Wilde has done at pulling her film out from the muck and mud it’s crawled through. If your female lead doesn’t even want to promote your movie about female pleasure, what does that say? Especially when she is far and away the best part of this vexing, atonal, plot hole-filled film?
While Wilde tries and fails to save both her film’s and her own reputation, Pugh continues to enjoy an Aperol spritz on the quote-unquote “set of Dune.” I think we know who’s better off.
