The movie about the making of Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling is going to be fascinating (who will they cast to play Shia LaBeouf in the scenes where he insists that he didn’t get fired?), but until somebody starts making that, we’ll have to keep relying on behind-the-scenes stories. Today we have Maggie Gyllenhaal interviewing Wilde for Interview Magazine, during which Wilde talks about the experience of acting in a movie that she was also directing—and the “bunch of dudes” who told her it was a “great” thing to try.
Wilde says that she only appears in Don’t Worry Darling as an actor “out of necessity,” explaining that they “basically ran out of money” and needed someone who would work for very little money but who still “understood the role.” The film’s casting director told Wilde that she should just do it herself (it was probably phrased nicer than that), so Wilde checked with some other directors she knows to see what it would be like. She tells Gyllenhaal that she ended up asking “a bunch of dudes” (Bradley Cooper is the one she calls out by name), and while they were supportive, they failed to realize that it’s easier for a man “in comfortable shoes” to quickly go from being on set to needing to look at the monitors.
“Part of it is that I was in a fucking bustier and heels and a wig,” she adds, saying, “they were coming at me doing these necessary but frustrating touch-ups at every second, and I was like, ‘I need to be at the monitor, I need to be in charge.” Still, Wilde says that dealing with that was important for showing “solidarity with the actors,” since they were all stuck in a desert with the high emotions that come from making a thriller (plus, as she says, “the COVID of it all”).
Elsewhere in the Interview interview, Wilde talks about how directing a Red Hot Chili Peppers video convinced her that more actors should push themselves as hard as musicians do, which is one of the reasons she wanted to cast Harry Styles in this movie. So, like with most things, you can thank Anthony Kiedis for that.