Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis split back in 2020 after a nine-year relationship that included having two kids together. Over the years, there’s been a lot of “inaccurate” rumors about what happened between the celebrity couple behind the scenes. However, now Wilde is getting candid about why they decided to end things six years ago.
Wilde recently got back in the director’s chair for The Invite, which is on the 2026 movie schedule and will be released later this month. While talking about the dramedy, she said it’s “no surprise” to her that she decided to do something about the complexities of long-term relationships after what she went through in her personal life with Sudeikis. As she recalled:
I remember the date ‘cause it was my birthday, but this is March 2020, March 10th. Jason and I had been having a rough time for a while. We had a real bumpy ride. Like, we had a real bumpy bumpy ride. And we were driving home from my birthday party my friends had had. And I said, ‘Did you give me a birthday present?’ And he said, ‘What would I get you, Olivia? I don’t know you.’ And he wasn’t wrong. We didn’t know each other anymore.
Wilde remembers the moment she realized she and Sudeikis had started to become close to “strangers” and opened up about what happened between them while on the Call Her Daddy podcast. As she continued in the interview:
And that was a point that was when we realized it was over, and it was fucking tough, and it brought us to the place of like, ‘Okay, this is done.’
News of Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis’s breakup may have taken shape early in 2020, but it didn’t become public until later in 2020. Wilde started dating Harry Styles not long after the news broke, and the former couple was in the middle of working through a custody battle for their two kids. Wilde’s love life became a media circus.
Infamously, while Wilde was promoting Don’t Worry Darling in 2022, she was served legal documents while on stage at CinemaCon by Sudeikis’s legal team. (Sudeikis has denied that he knew how she would be served). Then, when it came to her movie’s press tour, all sorts of rumors about her, the movie and its stars, which included Harry Styles and Florence Pugh, started taking shape. There was the feud with Pugh, “Spit-Gate” and pay disparity issues, for example.
Now that Wilde has had time to process it, she calls what happened in the media “fucking bananas” and “complete fiction traded as fact”. It sounds like her work on The Invite, which she directed and stars in, allowed her to explore some aspects of her relationship with Sudeikis. As she also shared:
This is the thing that made me want to make this movie because — or one of the things — because you can get to a place in a relationship where you stop engaging in the knowing of each other and the curiosity of each other, and you find yourself in a place where you’re like, ‘I don’t even know you.’
While breakups are never easy, they say time heals all wounds, and Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis seem to be in a much better place these days as they continue to co-parent their kids together. Along with that, Wilde has been dating businessman Caspar Jopling for around 9 months, while Sudeikis is reportedly single.
As for what the actress and director is up to professionally, The Invite sees Wilde and Seth Rogen play the characters of Angela and Joe, who are a constantly bickering married couple who invite their upstairs neighbors Pína and Hawk (Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton) to a dinner party that exposes the problems they are facing in their relationship. You can check out The Invite trailer right now, and see the movie in theaters on June 24.