Olivia Wilde Has Hit Her Stride

It’s been quite the summer for the actor. Previously boxed into forgettable girlfriend roles, she’s finally broken new ground with her standout performances in The Invite and I Want Your Sex, writes Yasmin Omar. 

This article contains spoilers for ‘The Invite’. 

Olivia Wilde gets her Mrs Robinson moment in I Want Your Sex. By that I mean there’s a shot of her outstretched legs, and high-heeled feet, perched seductively on a desk in the foreground, while a younger man (Cooper Hoffman) gawps lasciviously in the background. By gesturing to one of cinema’s great illicit relationships, the image communicates her power, control and sexual confidence. Wilde has big-dick energy in the film – and not just because her character wears dildos as belt charms. The role requires her to do something we’ve never really seen her do before: provoke. 

I Want Your Sex director Gregg Araki perfectly summed up Wilde’s acting career when he told The Big Picture podcast, ‘I feel like contemporary Hollywood didn’t know what to do with her. She was always playing the hot girlfriend or the hot wife or the mistress.’ A quick scan of her IMDb, littered with two-dimensional, Bechdel test-failing supporting parts, confirms this. But 2026 has been a banner year for Wilde precisely because she has forged a new path, appearing in two sex comedies in as many months that surpass the industry’s limited understanding of her. 

In The Invite, which she also directed, Wilde portrays Angela, a sexually unfulfilled housewife who’s so tightly wound she’s liable to snap. Desperate to make a good impression on the neighbours she’s welcomed into her home, Angela cares what other people think of her to the point of self-abnegation. She has lost touch with her body and its needs. When presented with what she wants – namely sex with Edward Norton’s stud of a firefighter – Angela cannot communicate her desires, brushing off his direct question about how to pleasure her. 

From her very first scene, Wilde projects Angela’s coursing anxiety and half-swallowed shame. You can practically see the catastrophising thoughts swirling around her head. In the actor’s hands, Angela becomes a fully realised portrait of middle-aged womanhood, where the stale familiarity of marriage bumps up against the alluring spark of new connection.  

If The Invite’s Angela is all rationalising ego, I Want Your Sex’s Erika Tracey is all hedonistic id. Part of what makes Wilde’s latest performance so thrilling is how completely it departs from her previous one.

Erika is a divisive, boundary-pushing artist whose primary subject is sex and sexuality. A self-assured ragebaiter, she will conduct press interviews in a breast-baring mesh dress – with a mischievous glint in her eye daring your gaze to slide south – before retreating to her papier-mâché-penis-adorned studio to photograph nude men putting on make-up for a project. The key conflict in I Want Your Sex revolves around the HR-violating dom-sub relationship Erika instigates with her 23-year-old assistant Elliot (Hoffman), where she is, of course, the top. Wilde throws herself, body and soul, into this role and everything it demands of her.  

The actor is in her ‘fuck it’ era – a creatively liberating place to be. There is a fearlessness to her characterisation of Erika, who is unapologetic and outspoken about what she wants. She speaks in firm, declarative sentences and is steadfast in her (often controversial) opinions. Although doms, from Harris Dickinson in Babygirl (2024) to Alexander Skarsgård in Pillion (2025), are enjoying a cultural moment, female doms haven’t received the same treatment. That’s likely because, under patriarchy, qualities that are admirable for men are unacceptable for women.

By taking on this part, Wilde is toying with both traditional definitions of femininity and her own persona as a control freak (the latter of which she spoofed last summer in Apple TV’s Hollywood satire The Studio, where she played an exaggerated, overly exacting version of herself to great effect).  

Erika Tracy asks a lot of any actor. She must pry and cajole and needle her underling – but in a flirtatious, appealing way. She must simulate BDSM sex acts – but take care to heighten their comedy. She must be, in the character’s words, ‘a pretentious whore from hell’ – but keep the audience onside enough so that we’re invested in the murder-mystery plot that scaffolds the film. And all of this, she must accomplish while sporting an ungodly amount of form-fitting latex and PVC.

Consider the scene where Elliot enters Erika’s office and finds her loudly playing an audio recording of her masturbating, which, she explains matter-of-factly, she’ll use to soundtrack a video installation. Now consider what Wilde had to do to make that scene work. In post-production, she probably went to a recording studio and, surveilled by a bunch of sound guys she’d never met, let rip over and over with pornographic squeals and pants and whimpers. The slightest hint of reticence or embarrassment would torpedo the performance. Wilde never reveals even a trace of self-consciousness.

At first it appears that everything about Erika is outsized – her statement jewellery, her reading glasses, her attitude… – and Wilde, rightly, plays her big. This is, however, a deceptively complicated role. The actor has to embody Erika’s version of herself and, in the film’s plentiful fantasy sequences, Elliot’s version of her too.

Unsurprisingly, the assistant’s imagined encounters with Erika are informed by the male gaze, and depict her fondling herself and willingly submitting to his desires, neither of which she does when they actually have sex. These reveries also soften her edges. As Elliot develops an emotional attachment to his boss, Wilde is required to puncture the character’s tough exterior and, midcoitus, murmur longingly about a shared domestic life the real Erika shows no interest in pursuing.   

And, to cap it off, Erika has a backstory as dark as her oxblood lipstick that Wilde teases out, without ever allowing implied trauma to overpower I Want Your Sex’s madcap humour. Revelations that Erika has been in therapy since she was six, or that she makes outrageous statements to check if people are listening, could weigh down the proceedings. But Wilde tosses off these lines with a deadpan frankness, indicating that Erika doesn’t want to dwell on her past.

On occasion, she’ll briefly cloud over at a memory before snapping back to reality, as people do when trying to suppress something unpleasant. Wilde’s performance gives little clues as to why Erika is the way she is: she’s distrustful of others, so keeps them at a distance, with interactions (sexual or otherwise) conducted entirely on her own terms. It’s more nuanced than you think. 

Hollywood actors are, and have always been, very aware of their own image. A key duty for the teams of agents and publicists that surround them is advising on how best to manage and maintain that image. There are performers who will not play certain parts for fear of tarnishing their persona, diminishing their stature or, god forbid, not appearing heroic.

That Olivia Wilde saw the major setback of Don’t Worry Darling (2022) as an opportunity for reinvention is laudable. That she took on not one, but two roles centred on sex at a time where almost half of Gen Z don’t want to see it on screen, even more so. By throwing caution to the wind, Wilde has found her best film roles yet, channelling nervous insecurity in The Invite then hard-pivoting into no-nonsense swagger for I Want Your Sex. She’s really shown us what she can do. Let’s hope casting directors are paying attention. 

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