Wilde thrills at the prospect of movement, setting a pace to match her buoyant mood. “I don’t belong at a desk. I don’t. I can’t. I hate it. After Don’t Worry Darling, I went right into the development of giant studio movies, a process that takes years and a lot of Zooming,” she says. She is still working on a studio comedy that is inching toward production. “After a while you think, ‘I didn’t get into this to have a desk job. I need to just go make something to remember what we actually f-cking do.’”
The filmmaking process was quick, unusual, and exactly the type of production Wilde had always dreamed of. After reading a script by longtime writing partners Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, she pitched the writers and cast on workshopping it together. Sitting around a table in the soundstage where the pilot for I Love Lucy was filmed, the six of them tailored the roles to the actors and infused the script with arguments, embarrassments, and confessions from their own relationships. Wilde brought in renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel to work with Cruz, who plays a therapist, and to offer advice on the marital ups and downs of the story. Wilde then shot the film sequentially—rare for small films and logistically impossible for larger ones—in just 21 days on a set designed to mimic a labyrinthian San Francisco apartment.
She had not, she says, known her heart needed plonking. “Because of the safety of this ensemble, I felt capable of that. I remember being in the middle of a scene and realizing that I was releasing something that had been embedded inside me that I hadn’t even acknowledged was still there,” she says. “I thought, I’ve been extremely therapized; I’ve processed; I’ve worked through everything. But that is the power of catharsis through art.”
Wilde, Rogen, Cruz, and Norton as four members of two very different couples —Courtesy of A24Born in New York City and raised, mostly in D.C., by journalist parents, Wilde broke out in Hollywood as an icon of millennial television with roles on The O.C. and House. She tended to play elusive women who communicated with withering looks rather than words, a stark contrast to the bubbly and talkative artist who pauses on our walk to compliment several muddy-pawed dogs. In hopes of finding more control on set, she made her foray into directing feature films with the 2019 high school graduation comedy Booksmart. A sort of spiritual sister to the 2000s comedies Rogen made with Evan Goldberg, like Superbad, the raunchy and heartfelt film positioned her alongside peers like Greta Gerwig, Jordan Peele, and John Krasinski as a successful actor-to-filmmaker crossover story.
When I suggest that the drama surrounding the movie might have been a blow, career-wise, she says the personal upheavals were what most affected her—the aspects of her life that could never fully be captured in the media. “Relationships are heartbreaking in ways that people never see. There’s the synthesized tabloid version of life,” she says. “When you feel you’ve been reduced and overly synthesized for maximum sales value, it’s like judging a watermelon on watermelon candy. You haven’t really experienced watermelon. But people are sure they know, and that is a whole other type of heartbreak.”
Wilde recognizes that people will inevitably draw parallels between her public breakups and the decisions made by characters in the movie. “If people sense it looks like maybe she has been through the dissolution of a relationship and heartbreak, yeah, I have, and I think that’s what gives me the muscle memory to represent this character fairly,” she says. “I don’t think I would have been able to play Angela if I hadn’t really f-cking felt myself tossed around by life and relationships. And I’m very open to the risk of confession. This sounds so pretentious, but they say great art is confession and should feel risky—that if it doesn’t feel risky then you’re not doing something worthwhile.”
Rogen and Wilde behind the scenes of the film —Courtesy of A24And it is. There are jokes about modern marriage and our deeply psychoanalyzed society. But the trick of the movie is how it vacillates between laugh-out-loud physical comedy and somber conversations. Rogen’s character Joe is a bitter former musician who teaches at a middling conservatory. Wilde’s Angela attended art school before becoming a stay-at-home mother. Now she feels lost and a little resentful toward Joe, who is all too quick to point out that she made the choice to stop working. “What do you do all day?” he asks after we have just watched a montage of Angela manically assembling a soufflé, laying out a charcuterie board, and redecorating their home for their guests. Equally cruel is the way Angela waves off Joe’s chronic back pain, a complaint he has lodged for so long it has lost its meaning.
Wilde cites as inspiration not only Perel’s book but her famous TED Talk on infidelity that ends with the widely cited idea that many people today have several key romantic relationships in their lives, sometimes with the same person: “Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?” It’s a notion that inspired debate during the making of The Invite. The cast sparred over why this miserable couple had stayed together and whether they would survive. Most at odds were Rogen and Wilde themselves. “When we shot it, Seth and I had two very different opinions about what would happen to this couple,” she says. “There was a real romantic optimism that Seth brought to it. The assumptions that everyone could make about their characters was revealing about their perspective on love.”
Their differences again came into relief when Rogen—who is proudly child-free—refused to believe that many couples with children, like Angela and Joe, stop having sex. Wilde was stunned. “It was an opportunity to see how the human struggles in long-term relationships in some ways are consistent, and then in other ways are completely specific to the couple themselves—and in Seth’s case, a totally singular experience,” says Wilde, laughing. “Seth is a true romantic, and apparently is just nailing marriage in every single way, which is a testament to his incredible wife, Lauren.”
“Americans have a puritanical sensibility that distrusts pleasure, specifically women’s pleasure, [and] this idea of sexuality persisting beyond parenthood,” she says. As with the child in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Joe and Angela’s daughter is mentioned but never seen—though for less mysterious reasons than in the Edward Albee play. “Parents don’t actually consider themselves as individuals unless they are away from their kids,” says Wilde. It is only because their daughter is at a sleepover that the reckoning can take place.
Wilde calls the ambiguous finale a Rorschach test—she’s polled the audience after every early screening: Half have believed the couple has hope, the other half that they’re doomed. “The goal was to have ambiguity without being annoyingly vague. We’re all just reaching for the Graduate ending.” As for Wilde, even she has come to a different conclusion after watching the film with audiences. “I love that it can change based on your mood,” she says. And her mood today is very good.
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