While presenting her upcoming psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling at CinemaCon, Olivia Wilde likened the project to mind-bending movies like The Matrix and Inception. Then came a head-scratcher.
An unidentified guest approached the stage to interrupt Wilde, as she read from the teleprompter, to place a manila envelope on the main stage inside the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in front of 3,000 exhibition industry insiders and press. “This is for me?,” Wilde asked the woman as she picked up the envelope. She paused her comments to open it with another question. “Is this for me?”
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Wilde pulled out the envelope’s contents and read the top page without missing a beat. “Thank you,” she said before turning her attention back to the prepared comments. In Getty photos distributed after the event, it’s clear that the envelope says “Personal and Confidential.” The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to reps for Wilde and the studio.
In the meantime, Wilde’s time on stage made news for other reasons as she offered up the first official trailer for the film that stars Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Wilde, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, KiKi Layne and Nick Kroll. “What would it take for you to give up your life, to do what is right? That is the question of Don’t Worry Darling,” Wilde said before unveiling the exclusive look that featured steamy sex scenes between leads Pugh and Styles and plenty of mystery surrounding an entity called the Victory Project. (She also praised exhibitors “who fought so hard to keep the movie business alive.”)
She had high praise for her actors, likening Pugh’s performance to “the birth of a full-fledged movie star” while calling called Styles, with whom she’s in a relationship, “a revelation.” She quipped, “I am also in the movie because I was the only one we could afford when we got to that point.”
Having Styles in a feature film can be seen as a coup for WB subsidiary New Line as the singer is dominating the cultural zeitgeist these days. Fresh from a headlining turn at Coachella where he performed for upwards of 100,000 people, Styles is sitting at the top of the Billboard charts with his single “As it Was,” from his anticipated forthcoming album, Harry’s House, due out in May. Basically, anything Styles touches generates global interest so interest surrounding the trailer is already high.
As an amusing aside, Wilde referred to Styles as “an up-and-coming actor with no other career that I am aware of.”
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