Olivia Wilde on swingers, therapy, and her new film The Invite
In The Invite, a San Francisco couple, Angela (Olivia Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen), are regularly terrified by hearing something going bump in the night. Except The Invite, the third directorial feature by Wilde, isn’t a horror film. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. The noises are from the upstairs neighbours, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), whose sex is so loud it reminds Angela and Joe of what’s absent from their marriage. However, when Piña and Hawk visit Angela and Joe for dinner, they reveal that the orgasmic screams aren’t from Piña – they belong to a friend called Vanessa. The upstairs duo are, in fact, swingers, though they have a rule: no more than six, unless it’s a birthday, in which case ten is allowed.
Elegantly shot on 35mm and scored by Dev Hynes, The Invite is both sophisticated and also the kind of gag-heavy sex comedy best enjoyed with a large, raucous crowd. The script was adapted by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack from Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish-language drama Sentimental. Whereas Gay’s film is keen to remind audiences it’s based on a play, Wilde turns the mostly single-location story into a kinetic, cinematic experience: the camera is constantly spinning around in new, inventive ways; the actors’ body language and demeanour evolves and collapses, often to the floor, as the chaos ensues; and it’s still, ultimately, a human narrative that keeps surprising you with whether the next line will be emotional, hilarious, or, in a memorable sequence about pegging, both.
A day before the film’s UK release, I met Olivia Wilde and Edward Norton in a London hotel to discuss The Invite, their love of Esther Perel (a consultant on the film), the film’s connection with Gen Z, and how the shoot functioned like art therapy. Beware of spoilers!
Olivia: The Invite is edited by Yorgos Mavropsaridis, who’s known for Yorgos Lanthimos’s films. Were you going for something like Dogtooth or The Lobster?
Olivia Wilde: At all times, that’s what I’m going for. Yorgos, the editor, who goes by Blackfish, is extraordinarily good at finding the tone of this unsettling dark comedy that has a rhythm unto its own. I wanted it to be so based in not only language, but the unspoken language of the characters. All of Lanthimos’s films are so much about subtext. There’s a darkness to his humour that is maybe very Greek, and I think Blackfish had it as well.
It was a process of putting the framework of the story together, and then plugging in the comedy-of-errors rhythm that was like a train running off the tracks. It was something I had on such a visceral level from being in the scenes, that I could say, ‘We have to somehow represent the energy we felt on the day.’ Which meant transferring that muscle memory into the avid, which took the most intense focus I’ve ever had to put into anything. It was a combination of Blackfish, Ant Boyce, and a team of awesome editorial assistants putting up with my obsessive insistence on finding this very specific rhythm. It was like having a song in your head, and trying to sing it to people.
A question for the actor side of you: do you become self-help experts when preparing for a movie?
Edward Norton: We shared personal experiences, things we observed in other people, or stories we knew about a friend. It all went into this soup pot. We constructed our own character’s issues, pathologies, and secret history out of the rawness we threw into the pot. You use your insights and experiences.
Olivia Wilde: For me, on this film, I think I probably was more vulnerable than I’ve ever been, in a way that actually surprised me. I didn’t realise how much I needed art therapy [laughs]. I’d done so much real therapy, but there’s something about…
Edward Norton: It was an exorcism.
Olivia Wilde: It was an exorcism! It was very cathartic.
Edward Norton: It was cathartic for all of us. I actually agree. Someone who’s had a big effect on all of us is the great therapist Esther Perel, who writes about long-term relationships, infidelity, and the idea of eroticism generally. A lot of what we took and liked from her work got personified in Penélope as Piña.
Olivia Wilde: It’s an interesting phenomenon right now that a lot of people are getting free therapy from podcasts, TikTok, the internet. It’s a great sign that people are more introspective about relationships and trauma, but it gives some of these therapeutic philosophies almost a cheap name – because it seems like that’s just ‘podcast therapy’. But there’s people like Esther who’s done more than 20 years of research into different cultures. I learned a lot from her podcast. But it’s a running joke in our film that [my character] Angela is obsessively listening to podcasts to try to find betterment. And yet a lot of the wisdom going into the podcasts is actually really valuable.
Do you know your enneagram numbers?
Olivia Wilde: Someone’s given it to me but I’ve forgotten it. I bet Rashida and Penélope know theirs. It was a real sharing session of different approaches to therapy, and I guarantee enneagrams were brought up.
Online, people think you’re both 6s, but that doesn’t seem right to me.
Olivia Wilde: I’m going to find out and see if I really am a 6.
Edward Norton: I don’t know what a 6 is.
Olivia Wilde: It’s not good. We have a lot of work to do. I’m kidding!
The idea of dismissing podcast therapy – I think that’s why my favourite part of the film is when Hawk does this sincere, heartbreaking monologue, and then Joe reduces it all to a mean comment about pegging.
Edward Norton: Seth made that up on the spot.
Olivia Wilde: When something genuinely surprises the other actors, you can feel that energy. You feel an authentic moment of shock. It’s very hard to fake genuine surprise. The audience can tell that us listening to Hawk’s story is totally real and spontaneous. We hadn’t heard Edward perform that.
Edward Norton: And Seth’s response was so rude! Honestly, it was so good, I was in shock. Penélope got quite irritated by it.
Olivia Wilde: Genuinely.
Edward Norton: And you were pretty appalled, too.
Olivia Wilde: I really was like, ‘Oh my God, Seth!’
Edward Norton: This was a new experience for all of us. The idea of playing something out that actually isn’t scripted, and that we trust is going to work and propel the thing forward – it was pretty wild [laughs].
“A lot of people are getting free therapy from podcasts, TikTok, the internet. It’s a great sign that people are more introspective about relationships and trauma, but it gives some of these therapeutic philosophies almost a cheap name”
What’s the reaction from younger audiences? And also swingers? All the reviews I’ve read are from people who identify with Joe and Angela.
Olivia Wilde: Younger audiences are loving this movie in a way that makes me so happy. It was not necessarily something I predicted. And yet when we’ve all talked about the movies we loved as really young people, they weren’t movies necessarily about our age. If something feels funny or authentic, it doesn’t matter how old you are to recognise that. I loved Woody Allen when I was 16. I wasn’t living a life anything like Woody Allen’s.
Edward Norton: When I watched movies when I was young like Husbands and Wives, Manhattan, or Who’s Afraid ofVirginia Woolf?, it’s this window into adult life, sophistication, and complexity. When you’re young, you’re just thinking about boyfriends, girlfriends, and sex. So when you watch those films, you go, ‘Oh, it gets complicated.’ It gets into someone who’s married, like Michael Caine’s character crushing on Barbara Hershey and writing her poems [in Hannah and Her Sisters]. When you saw those films, it expanded the spectrum of what you understood love and sex to be. I can see non-married people really looking through the doorway into this, and seeing things they haven’t got to yet, that are still really compelling.
Olivia Wilde: We were interviewed by a group of college students in Boston. I took the film there a couple of months ago, and these students kept telling me how much they loved the movie. I was like, ‘I thought no one was fucking. We’ve heard a lot about Gen Z. What do you like about the movie?’ There were queer kids – all different types of relationships. They were like, ‘This feels really relevant.’ One guy, who’s 19, goes, ‘This really brought up some conversations I need to have with my partner.’ I was like, ‘This is so cool!’
Don’t they live with their parents?
Olivia Wilde: Yeah. But Joe is living in his parents’ apartment! I asked Esther, because she’s a therapist. I said, ‘Esther, why do young people like the movie? I need to know what you think from a therapist’s perspective.’ She said: in the age of social media, the idea of unplanned social interaction, without any pre-curation, is actually exotic and thrilling. The idea that you will have friction in an unexpected event. People are like, ‘No, I don’t go out unless I know where I’m going, who’s going to be there, what their beliefs are, and what will occur.’ The idea of a collision with people, and being unprepared for it, and friction, and people being honest, and everyone being very present, and no one just staring at their phones the whole time – that kind of social experience is, I think, almost fetishised by people who aren’t offered that typically.
Edward Norton: It’s wild – I never, until this moment, with me sitting with my phone next to me… [He points at his phone.]
Olivia Wilde: You’re Gen Z.
Maybe this film will be like how Scenes from a Marriage increased Sweden’s divorce race, except there’ll be a different effect. Or maybe you’ll also cause lots of divorces.
Edward Norton: Swinger conventions – sign up!
Olivia Wilde: I think more people will stay together because of this movie. I really believe that.
The Invite is out in UK and Irish cinemas now.
