By now, “Don’t Worry Darling” has become less a movie than an entire ecosystem of overheated online lore. Olivia Wilde’s second directorial feature arrived in 2022 amid tabloid frenzy: her relationship with Harry Styles, the Shia LaBeouf casting controversy, Florence Pugh’s seemingly limited press duties, and the alleged on-set friction that became inseparable from the film itself.
Nearly four years later, Wilde is addressing one of the biggest rumors directly. In a new profile with The Cut, the filmmaker and actress denied that a reported “screaming match” with Pugh ever happened during production on “Don’t Worry Darling.”
“I have never had a screaming match on my set. I was never not available on set,” Wilde said, adding that she wanted to push back against the rumors at the time publicly.
The allegation became one of the defining pieces of the “Don’t Worry Darling” media circus, even as 40 crew members later disputed reports of major on-set dysfunction and defended Wilde’s conduct during production. But as Wilde tells it now, the official strategy around the noise was silence. The studio and others involved, she said, encouraged her not to engage publicly and to keep smiling through the press cycle. Wilde now says she resents that approach.
It’s hard to overstate just how much the movie’s release got swallowed by extracurricular drama. “Don’t Worry Darling,” which starred Pugh, Styles, Wilde, Gemma Chan, KiKi Layne, Nick Kroll, and Chris Pine, was positioned as Wilde’s big follow-up to “Booksmart,” her widely admired 2019 directorial debut. Instead, the psychological thriller became a case study in how quickly gossip, stan wars, red-carpet body language analysis, and internet mythology can overtake a movie.
The Cut profile frames Wilde as someone trying to rebuild after that experience. Her new film, “The Invite,” stars Wilde and Seth Rogen as a married couple whose dinner with their swinger neighbors, played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz, turns into a marital reckoning. The film reportedly sparked a Sundance bidding war and was acquired by A24 for more than $12 million.
Wilde is also set to appear in Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex,” but the larger point of the profile seems to be that she is no longer willing to let the public narrative run entirely without her. Whether that changes the way people remember the “Don’t Worry Darling” saga is another matter. But Wilde is now making her position clear: the infamous screaming match, she says, did not happen.
