'Many Years Ago'
"I never would've predicted that he would go the path that he's gone now, because he did seem really smart," the director-actress said in a wide-ranging conversation about misogyny
Olivia Wilde recalled meeting Elon Musk before his political associations with the Trump administration. In a wide-ranging interview with The Louis Theroux Podcast, the director-actress discussed the Tesla CEO, misogyny, and how her films examine relationships and intimacy.
When looking back at her 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling, Wilde said that conservative commentator Jordan Peterson was an inspiration for Chris Pine’s character. While Wilde said it may have been “unfair” for her to call Peterson a “pseudo-intellectual,” she was “disturbed by what I saw as this kind of misogynistic philosophy that was being obviously weaponized in a way that was leading us to elect Donald Trump twice.”
The filmmaker likened the movie’s themes of men who believe they are “more powerful than nature” to deep-rooted misogyny today. Wilde suggested that Musk follows this way of thinking and cited his “underpopulation crisis” obsession.
