Olivia Wilde, Edward Norton open up about love, trust and 'The Invite'
NEW YORK – Olivia Wilde has two rules for dinner parties: Don't squander a priceless bottle of wine, and don't start cleaning up before it's even over.
"Enjoy your own party!" says Wilde, 42, who hosts a spicy, sozzled soirée in her R-rated marriage comedy "The Invite" (in select theaters now, nationwide July 10). "I don't like going to someone's party when I can feel them working the whole time because then I feel really guilty. Keep it easy. No work allowed!"
Like Angela, her tightly wound character, Wilde loves a cheese shop and splurging on cured meats: "People would rather have a full charcuterie board than almost anything else you're going to serve," she says. "Just hope everybody isn't lactose intolerant or vegan."
Wilde's co-star Edward Norton, meanwhile, is content just to nosh on some "really good cookies."
"I'm giving away my sweet tooth here," Norton, 54, says with a grin. "I like when someone puts little boulders of chocolate out. I just want chunks of chocolate to be thrown on the table."
Edward Norton calls 'The Invite' a 'very intimate' film
Set over one marijuana- and Xanax-addled night, "The Invite" follows Angela and her gruff musician husband, Joe (Seth Rogen), whose passionless marriage is on life support. Enter their noisy yet impossibly chic upstairs neighbors, Hawk (Norton) and Pína (Penélope Cruz), who make an alluring proposition that forces Joe and Angela to re-evaluate their relationship.
The movie is Wilde's third outing as a director, after 2019 high-school comedy "Booksmart" and 2022 sci-fi thriller "Don't Worry Darling," which was overshadowed by the tabloid frenzy surrounding its megawatt cast. "The Invite" finds the actress returning to her indie roots with a dialogue-heavy, single-location story that is heavily indebted to the works of Woody Allen, Mike Nichols and Nora Ephron.
The film is adapted from a 2020 Spanish comedy, which itself is based on a play. When Wilde first read Rashida Jones and Will McCormack's script, she saw herself more so in Joe, who shoots from the hip − unlike the meticulously organized, eager-to-please Angela.
"I am not the keeper of the calendar; it's always an adventure and always a surprise," Wilde says. "And the idea of being ambushed with a social situation is actually my nightmare."
Wilde and her co-stars rehearsed for two weeks before filming started, tweaking dialogue as they got candid with one another about platonic and romantic relationships. Norton, for instance, drew many of Hawk's idiosyncrasies from his friends.
"It was like, ‘Let's all talk for real about what we've gone through and people we know,' " says Norton, who has been married to producer Shauna Robertson since 2012. "There was a freedom to bring ourselves and to work it in to this text. It didn't feel like we were encountering this existing thing and going, ‘Oh, that's a little too close to the bone.' Olivia was like, ‘Go close to your bone and bring it into the film.' Not to sound gooey, but it was a very intimate experience."
Wilde wanted to explore what it means to no longer know or communicate with your partner – an experience that mirrored her own 2020 breakup with fiancé Jason Sudeikis, with whom she shares two children: Otis, 12, and Daisy, 9. Although she initially had no intention of starring in "The Invite," she now considers it the performance she's proudest of, because of the level of vulnerability she was able to bring to the table.
"You can't direct a film if you have these guards up," Wilde says. "I felt so safe with this particular group. And it also felt like, ‘If I am asking you guys to be honest, then I'm going to be honest.'
"[Edward] said, ‘If you were drawn to tell this story, then it means that you have something to say,' " she recalls. "I remember that really hitting me and realizing that it was much more personal than I had understood. It was at that point that I plugged into why it was a personal film, and that opened the whole thing up for me in several different ways."
Why Olivia Wilde was finally 'ready' to make 'The Invite'
Most couples watching "The Invite" will find it impossible not to recognize themselves, whether it's the conspiratorial way that Angela and Joe sneak off to gab about their neighbors, or facepalm in embarrassment after some tequila-fueled confessions. It's a movie that's as laugh-out-loud funny as it is tear-jerking, as Joe and Angela finally put everything out in the open and reckon with their future together.
From an audience perspective, "what's almost more interesting is: What do people want for them?" Norton says. "Some people are going to be in a place in their life where they want there to be hope, and some people will be saying, ‘Run, girl.' What people project [onto the film] will be rooted in the way they're feeling."
"The Invite" was a hit with critics at Sundance Film Festival in January and is already considered an early Oscar contender. In recent weeks, Wilde has enjoyed sneaking into theaters to gauge moviegoers' reactions, and she hopes they find a similar sort of catharsis that she did in making it.
"We resonate with things when we're ready to and we can really understand them," Wilde says. "I think a lot of people are connecting with this movie because they have had difficult relationships. … It takes a certain amount of understanding of these issues in order to responsibly tell the story. Could I have made this movie when I was 20? No, it would have been really bad."
Ultimately, it's about "people wanting to be better versions of themselves and being more open to different ways of thinking," Wilde says. "It's asking you to go under the surface and to say the things that you don't think you're allowed to say."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Olivia Wilde, Edward Norton open up about love, trust and 'The Invite'
Reporting by Patrick Ryan, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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This story was originally published July 7, 2026 at 10:55 AM.