Olivia Wilde is Irish like the Manchester-Irish are Irish. Stay with me here. Yes, she was born in New York and raised largely in Washington, but, like Steve Coogan and Noel Gallagher, she spent many formative summers on the old sod. When the time came to attend drama school, she plumped for the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin. Born Olivia Jane Cockburn – her grandfather Claud Cockburn wrote for The Irish Times – she took Wilde as a professional name in honour of the blessed Oscar. There is no need to wrap her in the flag. She has already done that.“Yeah, I spent a lot of time there as a kid,” she says. “We went back and forth constantly. I always considered myself just as Irish as I am American. Because, as a kid, your summers are kind of what define you.”That makes sense. And her family has roots in Ireland.“I was always there. And I still go back. I’m going in a couple of weeks. My family is all there right now. We still have the same house. We are in Ardmore, which is in Co Waterford.”We will come back to all that, but mention must first be made of Wilde’s third film as director. She and her costar Edward Norton are here to discuss an acidic, sharply written comedy-drama titled The Invite. Wilde and Seth Rogen play a well-off couple from San Francisco whose uneasy marriage develops potentially fatal cracks when Norton and Penélope Cruz, as superior upstairs neighbours, descend to spread sexually charged gobbledygook. The film is a classic in the drinks-shindig-from-hell genre to compare with Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Before too long, barbed insults are being spat across the charcuterie platter.Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz star in The Invite There is a social truth here. Nothing brings out the suppressed tensions in a relationship more than the arrival of guests.“I think it’s impossible to not be witnessed when you bring someone else into your home and reveal your relationship,” Wilde says. “It is often when it crystallises. It becomes unavoidable. The truth of it is terrifying for many.”Remember the savage unleashing of hostilities between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor when Sandy Dennis and George Segal call over for drinks in Mike Nichols’s film of the Albee play.“I think that’s why it’s been used over and over again, and certainly Virginia Woolf was our North Star for the film in several ways,” Wilde says. “But I think that it’s also something very relatable. Most people have had the unique terror of being witnessed by other people coming into their home and seeing…”“I don’t think it’s just the others,” Norton says. “I think the inevitable thing is that, when you host, you watch your partner too. You watch the performance of your partner.”“Yes, yes!” Wilde says.She has spoken elsewhere of how she brought her own pain to the eccentric creation process. Cast members joined Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, the film’s screenwriters, in lengthy workshops that helped mould the roles to fit the actors. “My character had this experience of heartbreak that was not foreign to me,” Wilde told Time magazine. “The movie was in many ways plucking from experiences that I’ve had.”Don't Worry Darling: Florence Pugh and Harry Styles in Olivia Wilde's film. Photograph: Warner Bros From 2003 until 2011 she was married to the Italian-American film-maker, photographer, musician and aristocrat Tao dei Principi Ruspoli. A nine-year relationship with the actor Jason Sudeikis, star of Ted Lasso, had an unhappy coda when, in 2022, she was served with court documents regarding custody of their children while presenting footage of Don’t Worry Darling, her second film as director, at the CinemaCon industry event in Las Vegas. Then there was the hoo-ha around her relationship with Harry Styles, star of Don’t Worry Darling, in the run-up to that year’s Venice International Film Festival.It’s not easy living under the hot gaze of a greedy media. There has been a lot to process in her life.“I would never have been able to make this film in my early 20s, when you think you know a lot about relationships but you really know nothing,” she says. “I love the value of getting older and going through things. The deep humbling of life as you tumble through it gives you this wisdom – the wisdom to laugh at the most painful parts of life as well.”Olivia Wilde directing on the set of The Invite Wilde took inspiration from Nora Ephron, the late writer of Heartburn and When Harry Met Sally. That first work, a book and then a film, had much to do with Ephron’s marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein.“I’m a big fan of Nora Ephron,” the director says. “The ability to laugh at herself was such a gift to the rest of us, because it allowed us to feel less alone. When she wrote Heartburn it was a catharsis for herself and for generations to come. Because it has this sense that you can go through something that allows you to have perspective that is really valuable. I think that all of us were bringing texture from our personal lives into this script.”The process sounds most unusual. Not only were the actors involved with mutating the screenplay but The Invite was shot sequentially, to allow emotions and tensions to build. Taking inspiration from Cesc Gay’s Spanish film The People Upstairs, The Invite developed into its own singular beast.“There was this wonderful workshopping process of everybody just pouring in anecdotes or observed experiences to create this kind of stew that felt very specific,” she says. “It was all based in experiences, and certainly for myself. I am so lucky to have a job where we get to pour in everything we’ve been through and explore it through art.”Norton, who starred in Fight Club and American History X, has been in the business for more than 30 years, but he has rarely been granted as much freedom as on The Invite.“It evolved more than anything I’ve ever worked on,” he says. “The text of it, the actual structure, and even the end. When we started shooting, the entire last act was different to what we actually ended up doing. That changed on the basis of the scenes as they unfolded, but I would say it was the most improvisation of any film I’ve ever been in.”Wilde has an interesting background. Claud, a busy journalist who actively opposed appeasement before the second World War, was born in Beijing (as it then wasn’t) to a senior British diplomat, but he ended up living in Youghal, Co Cork, until his death in 1981. His wife of 41 years, Patricia Arbuthnot, from Rosscarbery, in west Co Cork, was a distinguished writer, artist and expert on mollusc shells. [ Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism - A manic press careerOpens in new window ]Andrew Cockburn, Wilde’s father, one of five remarkable children to Claud, is a respected journalist – an expert on national security – who acts as the Washington correspondent of Harper’s magazine. It is said Christopher Hitchens used to babysit the young Olivia.“I think that kind of upbringing has filled me with a sense of responsibility,” she told The Irish Times in 2010. “We were raised to be politically aware. I have a family that has dedicated itself to social justice and bringing truth to light.”Now a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States, she attended Georgetown Day School in Washington when not holidaying in Co Waterford. Wilde secured a place at Bard College, the prestigious liberal-arts school (where Steely Dan met, apparently), but she threw it in for acting and, ultimately, a berth at the Gaiety School of Acting. She has spoken of a “certain humility that goes with the acting business in Dublin that I could not have learned elsewhere”.The OC: Olivia Wilde with Mischa Barton in the zeitgeist-defining TV series. Photograph: Fox The Cockburn name carries some weight but, when turning professional, she leaned towards the author of The Happy Prince and The Importance of Being Earnest. “Olivia Wilde” trips off the tongue nicely. Work came quickly enough. Striking in appearance and with a sharp voice, she secured a regular role in the zeitgeist-defining TV series The OC from 2004 to 2005. She played Remy “Thirteen” Hadley opposite Hugh Laurie in five series of the medical drama House. She moved into directing with the hugely admired comedy Booksmart in 2019.Linking herself spiritually to Oscar Wilde clearly did the career no harm.“I knew I wanted it to be an Irish name, and at the time I had just done The Importance of Being Earnest,” she says. “It was my first experience of being really thrilled on stage and thrilled by the experience of it. Then I just read everything I could find written by Wilde or about Wilde, and I became really deeply, deeply obsessed.”The connection does not seem to have dimmed over the years.“I wanted to take it in honour of him as a great Irish person, but also to remind myself to try and be as bold as him. Of course, in no way would I be trying to align myself with his brilliance. But it’s now been my name longer than it hasn’t.”Olivia Wilde. Photograph: Elizabeth Weinberg/The New York Times A thought occurs to her.“I feel continuously inspired by that sense of trying to be bold like Oscar. Then we put him in the movie!”Indeed she did. The Invite begins with an epigram from the author’s An Ideal Husband: “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.” When I casually note that this seems a tad pessimistic, Wilde pounces.“Is it pessimistic?”Well, um. I guess so. If we believe in marriage as an institution.“That’s on you!” Norton says.“I added that while I was editing the film because I wanted to contextualise the experience for the audience from the beginning,” Wilde says. “I really am a fan of when directors do that. Obviously, Woody Allen does it a lot. I love it in literature as well. There is something really nice about beginning with a quote or a poem as a way of saying: this is my perspective on this, but you will only understand it once you have finished this.”[ Himesh Patel on Enola Holmes 3: ‘The casting decisions were made to tell a very honest story about colonialism’Opens in new window ]So she is not casting a blight on all marriages?“It is saying that the act of being in love is something we should all aspire to at all times,” she says. “Being married oftentimes ends that act. But it doesn’t have to. I think what the film was trying to say is: you can choose to continue participating in the engagement of loving; don’t let marriage end that process.”The Invite marks a moment of quiet resurgence for Wilde. Recipient of much silly gossip – remember the absurd invention that Harry Styles had spat in Chris Pine’s lap at Venice – Don’t Worry Darling, also starring Florence Pugh, landed as a critical flop on release in the autumn of 2023 (although it took a respectable amount at the box office). Wilde picked herself up, worked hard on The Invite and took it to the Sundance Film Festival where it premiered to unbroken raves.Now she gets to bring it home. First Sundance, then Co Waterford.“Our movie is coming out in Dungarvan this weekend. Our local theatre is in Dungarvan and everybody in the village is going,” Wilde raves.Norton expresses enthusiasm for making the trip.“It’s the best. There’s nothing better,” she says.“We can stay in Jeremy Irons’s castle?” he asks.Good Lord, man. That is over in Skibbereen. A universe away.The Invite is in cinemas from Friday, July 3rd