Highlights
- Olivia Wilde laughs off viral red carpet photo that sparked health concerns and Graves’ disease rumors
- She reflects fondly on her “loveliest” relationship with Harry Styles despite intense public backlash
- Wilde recalls the exact moment she knew her engagement to Jason Sudeikis was over
Olivia Wilde is setting the record straight, and she’s not holding back.
The 42-year-old actress and director sat down with Alex Cooper on the Wednesday, June 17, episode of Call Her Daddy for a tell-all that touched on her romance with Harry Styles, her split from Jason Sudeikis, and the viral red-carpet photo that had the internet convinced she was unwell.
Wilde immediately knew where Cooper was headed when the host brought up the picture from the San Francisco International Film Festival in April. “I’m so happy you’re bringing this up,” she said, before bursting into laughter.
“Looking like an actual dead body,” Wilde said, adding, “I looked like, did you ever watch, are you too young for, Tales from the Crypt?” She went on to compare herself to the show’s corpse-like host, the Cryptkeeper, joking that she “looked like a shrunken” version of herself.
The actress said she had no idea the photo would blow up the way it did. “We did the red carpet, and then I saw that picture and I was like, ‘Alright, but it probably won’t go very far. No one’s going to see this,'” Wilde said. “And then suddenly it was f—ing everywhere. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God.'”
The fallout got intense fast. “People were diagnosing me with Graves’ disease. Megyn Kelly did an entire segment about how much I looked dead,” she said. “But I was really like, ‘This is undeniably hilarious.'” Wilde even said her own brother did a “spit take” when she showed him the photo, telling her she looked “insane.”
Wilde didn’t stop there. She also opened up about her two-year relationship with Styles, which began on the set of Don’t Worry Darling and sparked relentless tabloid scrutiny over their age gap. “We had the loveliest relationship,” she said, recalling the backlash. “It really did upset people,” Wilde noted. “People were f—ing p—ed!”
Still, she described the romance fondly. “I think that we existed in like this little bubble and the judgment never really got into that bubble, which was a miracle and a real testament to us making that happen,” she added.
As for Sudeikis, Wilde recalled the exact moment she knew their nearly decade-long relationship was over. “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.'” She admitted, “And he wasn’t wrong.”
Wilde also addressed the infamous moment she was served custody papers onstage at CinemaCon in 2022, calling it one of “the most f—ed up things” she’s gone through. She added that lawyers “can be super f—ed up and do f—ed-up things,” but said she doesn’t believe Sudeikis was behind the public nature of the delivery.
Despite the chaos of that era, Wilde says she and Sudeikis, who share two children, have settled into a steady co-parenting rhythm. “It’s an interesting thing,” she told Cooper. “Once you are sharing custody with someone, it shifts the way you think about parenting.”
