Olivia Wilde went on the Smartless podcast this week and told two stories. One was about her new film. The other was about Sam Rockwell lying his way into a role and getting away with it for years.
According to The Wrap, Wilde recalled a story she first heard as a teenager working as an assistant to casting director Mali Finn between ages 16 and 18. Finn told her staff that the best audition she had ever witnessed was Rockwell auditioning for The Green Mile. Wilde carried that story with her for years before she finally got to tell Rockwell about it in person while working alongside him on the 2011 film Cowboys and Aliens.
The story, as Wilde knew it: Rockwell arrived on the last possible day of director sessions and had been given the wrong scenes. Rather than leave, he asked for the correct pages and said he would learn them in the hallway. They gave him five minutes. He came back in and delivered the lines clean.
"While I was working there, there was the legend of the Sam Rockwell audition," Wilde told Smartless hosts Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes. "She would tell us, 'The best audition I've ever seen was Sam Rockwell auditioning for "The Green Mile."'"
She described what happened when Rockwell asked for a chance: "So they gave him the right scenes, he goes into the hallway, they only have five minutes to give him to learn the lines. He comes back in, and he nails it. And they were floored, and he got the role."
Rockwell did land the role. He played Wild Bill Wharton, the antagonist in Frank Darabont's 1999 Stephen King adaptation.
When Wilde finally told Rockwell how much the story had inspired her, he admitted the whole thing was a setup. He had been given the correct sides from the beginning. He pretended they were wrong so that memorizing them on the spot would look impossible. It lowered expectations, then erased them.
"I was like, 'Are you f--king kidding me!?'" Wilde said of the revelation. "I revered his ability to flash memorize. He knew — he had the correct sides, it was a whole performance. And it's so genius because it lowers their expectations. Then if you e—" The Wrap notes the quote was cut off there.
Bateman, who is currently directing Rockwell in the upcoming Netflix feature The Cackling of the Dodos, laughed at the story. "He's a real crafty bugger. I'm gonna keep my knees bent," he said.
Wilde also used the Smartless appearance to talk about her directorial choices on The Invite, her third feature behind the camera. The film, written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, is set almost entirely inside a single apartment during a dinner party between two couples. Wilde stars alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton.
The format raised an obvious question about cameras. A dinner party scene with four speaking actors typically calls for multiple setups running at once, and shooting with two cameras would have been a practical solution.
Wilde said she resisted that approach after hearing Quentin Tarantino talk about it. "Did you have multiple cameras?" Bateman asked during the interview.
"We had one camera," Wilde said. "The last week, we brought in a second camera cause … there were some scenes that … benefited from two cameras. But I didn't want to. I felt like I had been inspired by, like, Tarantino saying like, 'Don't be a hack. Have one camera, pick your perspective. Anytime you have two cameras, one shot is suffering. And I was like, 'Oh, that's cool.'"
Bateman pointed out the challenge of covering four people in conversation. Wilde said the production solved it by shooting each scene multiple times and relying heavily on shared frames, which also required precision from the crew when actors went off script.
"Yes, we did a lot of shared frame," Wilde replied. "That's why it was theatrical in that way … which is why we had the best focus puller in the world who could somehow predict when someone was going to improvise a joke."
The Invite premiered at Sundance earlier in 2026 and sparked an all-night bidding war. A24 acquired the rights in an eight-figure deal. The film opened in limited theaters on June 26 and went wide on July 10. It has earned nearly $10 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.
