Olivia Wilde has opened up about an odd critique she received about her appearance from a casting director early in her acting career.
The 42-year-old actor and director — whose new movie The Invite, co-starring Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton, had a limited release on June 26 — recalled being told she had a “pie face” on Monday’s episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.
After Shepard complimented her, asking her if she ever downplayed “how f***ing beautiful” she is, Wilde admitted: “No, because I did not feel beautiful at all. In fact, coming to L.A., I don’t know, does anyone get to this town and feel beautiful?
“I was like, this is crazy. The first waiting room I sat in as an actress, I was like, ‘Ah, I gotta go. This is a different species,’ I think that it took me a while to understand that what made me, I guess we all kind of go on this journey, but like what made me different was good and I didn’t need to try to make myself look like the other girls, but I really felt unattractive,” she said.
“I definitely just felt such imposter syndrome. I remember a casting director early on, when I went to an audition, told me I had a ‘pie face,’” Wilde said. “But she kind of said it in a way that sounded like she was trying to be nice.”
“She said something like, ‘You’ll be fine. You’ve got...’ I think she might’ve said apple pie, pumpkin pie — so there was maybe a flavor attached to the pie,” the Don’t Worry Darling director recounted. “But I think she was trying to say something nice. I took it as like, ‘You are hideous,’ like flat [face], big head.”
Wilde remembered walking away from the audition feeling defeated. “When I think about the drawer of push-up bras that I had for auditions because I thought maybe that would help, and it doesn’t,” she noted. “And it’s so sad — being a 19-year-old going to auditions is rough.”
Just last month, the House alum reacted in good humor to cruel comments about her appearance after a red-carpet interview with SFGate at the premiere of The Invite went viral for the wrong reasons.
Social media commentators suggested that Wilde looked bug-eyed and skeletal in the footage, even going so far as to compare her to Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films.
Addressing the comparisons in a video on her Instagram Story, she posted a screenshot of her viral conversation with SFGate next to a photo of the Lord of the Rings character.
In the background, her brother, Charlie Cockburn, asked: “Olivia Wilde, do you care to address recent rumors that you’re a resurrected corpse?”
“Listen, that’s a fisheye lens,” she laughed in the video. “And I admit, is that my best angle? Was that my best-ever look? No. No, it’s startling. It’s a startling image.”
Reiterating that “it was a fish-eye lens,” Wilde added, “I don’t know why I was so close to the camera. I didn’t have to be. That’s not the truth.”
“Do you have any more questions?” she asked her brother. “I’m not dead.”
The Invite, which follows a couple who invite their enigmatic neighbors to a dinner party that quickly spirals into unexpected places, is already garnering Oscar buzz. It is Wilde’s third-directed feature film and comes four years after her divisive sci-fi thriller Don’t Worry Darling.