During Don't Worry Darling debacle, Olivia Wilde was told to shut up and smile

In a new interview with The Cut, Wilde reveals that during the Don’t Worry Darling debacle, she was told to stay silent and let the rumor mill run things. Unfortunately, stories of “a screaming match” with star Florence Pugh, which Wilde denies, and her hush-hush relationship with Harry Styles, gave the film the stink of bad buzz. “I wanted to be like, ‘None of this is true,'” she tells The Cut. Sadly, she was told to shut up and smile. “I was told, ‘Don’t say a fucking word. Just go out there and smile,'” she says. “I resent that, but it taught me it’s not the way I want to handle things.”

Wilde chalks this up to how the public treats its stars. She refers to some advice Jennifer Garner gave her in the early ’10s: “It’s like you get cast in a soap opera by the public, and they assign you an obvious archetype: the damsel in distress, the good girl.” After enjoying years as “an object of desire,” Wilde believes she was recast as a “full-on villain, like Cruella.” It does seem like she’s now out of the media’s Cruella spot.