After a few appearances in TV shows and movies, including a stint on The O.C. where she played a bisexual bar owner who dates two of the show’s most popular leads, Wilde broke out in one of the biggest shows in the late 2000s. Opposite Hugh Laurie in House, Wilde played another prominently bisexual character: Remy “Thirteen” Hadley, a doctor with Huntington’s disease. Thirteen endured her boss’ assumptions and jokes about her personal life, but the writers gave her a deeper arc, from crashing out over her diagnosis and sleeping with strangers, to dating a coworker and, by the series’ end, getting a pink slip to live out the rest of her days with her girlfriend. Thirteen is intensely private—so much so that most people would only recognize her character by the nickname House gives her—but the fact that Wilde was able to bring multidimensional sides to her character’s story felt pretty groundbreaking to watch on Fox at that time.
For a few years after leaving House, Wilde landed supporting roles as love interests, and even as an aspiring magician in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, but a few films allowed her to step outside traditional bit parts, like Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies. There, Wilde plays Kate, an employee of a brewery company opposite a well-matched work husband, Luke (Jake Johnson). After a trip with their respective partners, Kate gets dumped, and things get messy between the two close friends as they grow closer. Like a younger version of her member of the normie couple in The Invite, Wilde’s character is open to breaking down buttoned-up boundaries around sex, leaning into the messiness of heartbreak, rebound sex, and exploration. While Kate and Luke seem perfect on paper, that doesn’t necessarily translate into that kind of romance, and the two take a different path forward—a relatively mature perspective on the imperfect nature of relationships.
Wilde’s feature debut, Booksmart, took a different approach, earning comparisons to Superbad on its release, in that both movies’ set of high school social misfits are horny and would like to know what sex is before leaving for college. But by focusing on Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy’s (Kaitlyn Dever) romantic foibles, the film showed that guys weren’t the only ones who dreamed horny dreams. Booksmart opened up a new way to talk about those nascent desires, the awkward phase of first sexual experiences, and the spectacular failure when trying to hide that side of yourself from your parents. Marriage wasn’t the goal. These characters just wanted to lose their virginity. While Wilde didn’t write Booksmart, she did choose it to make her directorial debut, perhaps impressed by a script whose frankness felt like a belated rebuttal to the guy-centric comedies of the aughts that often kept women on a pedestal or as underwritten objects of desire.
Sex is certainly not the only thing on Wilde’s mind, but as she alternates being behind and in front of the camera, she’s still finding angles that interest her. Wilde’s sophomore film Don’t Worry Darling plays in the higher-stakes world of erotic thrillers; a woman under the control of 1950s domesticity breaks out and chooses herself over complacency. Rejecting normalcy is just one of the ways in which Wilde wants to push boundaries around traditional heterosexual relationships. Whether that’s through examining hierarchies in I Want Your Sex or pushing for a wife to voice her desire within a traditional relationship in The Invite, she’s picking projects that are fearless, whether that manifests as unbridled hedonism or emotional vulnerability. She clearly wants audiences to ask those frisky questions after the film, to embrace the curiosity around different flavors of pleasure. She’s exploring the kind of grown-up movies that used to hit theaters that weren’t aiming for cross-generational approval, and her choice of projects prioritizes openness in this repressive age of conservative capitalism.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.