Wilde thing
Olivia Wilde, star of Tron: Legacy and House discusses bowling with Jeff Bridges, campaigning for Obama and having Mick Jagger round for tea.
Nothing dates faster than the past's vision of the future, and 28 years on Tron, the cult sci-fi film, looks like a clunky iPhone app. Happily, later this year a sequel, Tron: Legacy, will provide an update, with the triple whammy of original star Jeff Bridges, fresh from his Best Actor Oscar win, a soundtrack provided by futurist Frenchmen Daft Punk and, most bang up-to-date of all, the beautiful 26-year-old actress Olivia Wilde as the film's female lead.
The chief attraction for Olivia was the opportunity to work with Bridges, whom, she says, regaled his co-stars with stories of the sushi-only diet required to fit into the skintight suits of the original. Olivia was more interested in another Bridges role. "I was asking him questions about The Big Lebowski," she says, referring to the Coen brothers' cult classic. "We wanted to go bowling with the Twilight crew, who were shooting in Vancouver at the same time. We knew we'd win because we had The Dude on our team."
Olivia first grabbed attention in the teen TV drama The OC, as Mischa Barton's bi-curious love interest. Later she starred oppositeJustin Timberlake in Alpha Dog, and with Jack Black in last year's caveman comedy Year One. Following that, Wilde has been frequently mentioned as a future Bond girl. Not true, she says, though she will soon be seen opposite Daniel Craig, in Jon Favreau's Cowboys And Aliens, in which a spaceship crash-lands in the Wild West.
What she's best known for, though, is her recurring part onHouse, the hugely successful Hugh Laurie medical drama. She plays Dr Remy 'Thirteen' Hadley, and her physician's wardrobe has done wonders for her career. "The minute people see you in a lab coat they believe you can be anything official," she says. "It's like having a magical cloak that makes people believe you know what you're talking about. People were surprised I wasn't stupid. They were like 'But you're a young woman! In Hollywood!"
Born in New York but raised in Washington DC, Olivia's parents are Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, both respected and influential journalists (Olivia changed her surname in honour of Dublin's most famous playwright; she studied acting in the city). As a child, then, Olivia was accustomed to the company of the great and the good, not to mention the notorious: Mick Jagger was a frequent visitor to the family home, and Christopher Hitchens was her babysitter.
"I was exposed to all these renegades - whether from journalism or music or politics," she says. "They were all so encouraging." Similarly supportive was her political pin-up, Barack Obama, for whom Olivia campaigned long before he became a presidential shoe-in. After canvassing college students in 2007, she received a thank-you phone call from the then presidential candidate. "I think I said 'honoured' about seven times too many. The second I hung up I just freaked out. Later I found out I hadn't actually hung up and he was still on the other end of the line. It was humiliating." Some day soon, you sense, Obama is going to be telling journalists the story of how he once had a personal phone call with Olivia Wilde.
Originally published in the June 2010 issue of British GQ.
Source
xoxo
Carrie
0 comments:
Post a Comment