Edward Norton says screening The Invite has left people “almost tearful,” and Olivia Wilde describes the film as both “thrilled and ruined” because it’s hard to imagine recreating the same creative rush again. The sex comedy—directed by Wilde and starring Nort
The next day after a flight from Los Angeles to London, Edward Norton felt so dreadful he decided to get a massage—and he almost started crying.
He tells it with a half-laugh, remembering the sound the therapist made as the session began: “You’re like: ‘Oh!. Ah!’” The moment stayed with him. He’s now been hearing something similar from cinemas as audiences watch The Invite. which he stars in and which Olivia Wilde directs. “People are almost tearful,” Norton says. “They’re like: ‘I haven’t had a good, adult laugh that made me feel seen in a long time.’”.
Wilde sits beside him, directing the energy toward the crowd. “My favourite audience laugh. ” she says. “is that which seems to say: ‘I thought I was the only one!’ It’s like ha-ha-ha-aaah; a little bit of a moan. When you hear yourself laugh at something that feels revealing. and then someone else does so too. the quiet shame you felt is immediately relieved.”.
The Invite plays like a conversation people have been avoiding at dinner tables and in bedrooms. Wilde plays Angela, a frustrated artist married to failed musician Joe (Seth Rogen). They share a 12-year-old but. in practice. “not much else.” When their daughter is on a sleepover. Angela invites upstairs neighbours—smooth former firefighter Hawk (Norton) and his girlfriend. Piña. a therapist played by Penélope Cruz—for supper. The evening becomes what happens when marriage’s fantasies and resentments collide in public.
For Wilde and Norton, the film’s emotional hook isn’t just that it’s explicit or funny. It’s that it makes dysfunction feel universal. “Most people feel alone inside the dysfunction of their relationship,” Norton says. “Worried it’s only the two of you having these problems. Universality is a relief. It lets you forgive yourself a lot.”.
Piña is also a kind of bridge for the film’s psychology. The character voices key theories associated with Belgian-born, Manhattan-based psychotherapist Esther Perel. One of Perel’s ideas is that all relationships end. but sometimes can be “rebooted with the same person.” Another hovers over the story even when no one states it outright: “bed death. ” the film suggests. can be an inevitable byproduct of the American dream.
Wilde speaks directly about that culture of endurance. “It’s that American sense of duty: I have begun this marriage, I will complete it, I will muscle through,” she says. “The puritanical roots of our culture mean it’s not only shameful to value pleasure, but also to admit defeat.”
For women in that structure, she adds, marriage carries a particular kind of status. “For women in such a society, she says, there remains ‘a sense of achievement in marriage. You have signed a contract that will keep you safe and feels like success. Pleasure and your continuing exploration of it is secondary to keeping the family unit intact.’”.
She frames it through the film’s recurring contrast between what couples are assumed to be doing—versus what they’re not. Wilde describes how France can signal sex simply because there’s a small child present. while in America the logic flips: people are said not to be having sex because they have a small child. which “inherently signals the end of sexual exploration” and shifts femininity toward “duty and nurture.”.
That American specificity, Wilde and Norton insist, is real even though the film ultimately begins somewhere else. The Invite is based on a Spanish play that has already been turned into movies in Italy. Switzerland. France and South Korea. But the film is set in San Francisco. “channelling California’s favourite sexologist. ” and the cast workshopped the script for a fortnight with screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack.
Norton says it was also easy to personalize the material because of trust—“There was a lot of pre-existing comfort and trust” because he and Wilde had already worked together. The comedy also shares some “filthy DNA” with Sausage Party. the food orgy animation he previously collaborated on with Seth Rogen. Improvisation mattered too: Norton describes “very funny jokes. slapstick. ” and even a devastating speech in which Hawk explains the origins of his name.
He still sounds astonished that Wilde let him try it. “Directors just don’t say: ‘Don’t tell me what this key moment is going to be,’” Norton says. “Especially if you’re shooting on 35mm.” He’s equally amazed Seth Rogen agreed to the same kind of freedom. “Actually, I’m kind of amazed that Seth was OK with it. Seth is a very methodical and mechanical craftsperson.”.
More than a year later, Norton—56—says he’s still buzzing from how the film came together. He says the production pushed the cast into a “flow state. ” bringing “exuberant feelings” as they realized the story was assembling itself into something bigger. He points to the decision to film chronologically on a single set, over about three weeks. “He has made more than 50 movies,” but Norton calls The Invite the first he’d done filmed chronologically. “It would never, ever have had that arc if it had been shot out of sequence. We would have been much more cautious. It had a really profound effect on the way the story layered up toward its finale.”.
Wilde’s reaction is almost the mirror image of that. “I feel both thrilled and ruined by this experience,” she says. “Because I don’t know when I can possibly expect to have another one like this. To have a group of people so in sync. I do have that feeling that if I never made anything else, I’d be OK.”.
The film’s success arrived fast enough to sharpen the emotion. Following its premiere at Sundance in January, it was sold to A24 for $12m (£9m) after a bidding war. It is now described as a critical hit, a commercial sensation and an awards contender. The piece says it trumps the ecstatic reception given to Wilde’s 2019 directorial debut. Booksmart. and nearly wipes the memory of Don’t Worry Darling (2022). which pleased neither reviewers nor audiences. and also failed to satisfy Harry Styles fans.
Wilde’s career may be part of the story. but she returns again and again to what the film does inside people’s bodies and minds. “I’m a believer in the idea of using storytelling to experience emotions that no amount of therapy can unearth completely. ” she says. She adds she was surprised by her own performance because “things were sort of erupting from me that I didn’t plan for.”.
That includes Angela calling herself a “stupid fucking cunt” before reassuring Hawk that she’s fine—“it’s just her inner monologue.” Wilde says that moment is a tribute to the late Diane Keaton. dedicated in the film. Wilde describes Keaton as “probably the most self-effacing person I’ve ever encountered. ” and says that within so many of her great roles. Keaton had a “brutal and so vulnerable” awareness of oneself.
Wilde and Keaton played mother and daughter in 2015’s Christmas with the Coopers. Angela, Wilde suggests, inherits much from Keaton, just as the film mines Woody Allen’s best bickery comedies and the prickliest Mike Nichols.
Norton connects the “cunt” line to Keaton’s lineage in comedy. He points to Keaton’s “what a jerk” ramble in Annie Hall’s post-tennis scene. noting that it includes the first “la-di-da. ” and the first sight of Keaton’s classic hat-tie-waistcoat-slacks outfit—elements Wilde says she has adopted today. Norton says that the inner monologue element was also “a generational moment in that it was the first person doing the inner monologue. saying the quiet part out loud.”.
The film’s audience is asked to speak what they’ve held back, and to stay spontaneous. Norton says resistance to both is partly because of what “these things”—he gestures at his phone—are doing to people “psychosexually.” He says there’s only one moment involving tech in the movie. and that moment is “awful.” He also points to the absence as adding nostalgia. and to the core setup: a hastily arranged knees-up of near-strangers.
Wilde builds that into an argument about how modern life curates intimacy. “Now, our social worlds are heavily curated,” she says. “You gather in groups of like-minded people. You screen your date before you meet them. You already know everything about them. The idea, today, of collision with the unknown is completely foreign.” She says it’s also scary. “Tech tells us we don’t need other people.” And she ties it to Covid. saying it taught people to fear the other and embrace isolationism. Intimacy involves risk and friction, Wilde says, “all these things that now we are completely sanitising our lives of.”.
She argues that social media also blocks the evolution relationships require. “People have become brands,” she says. “Everyone has defined said brand. I wonder if having put a record out there of who you are, and what your interests are, means people are giving themselves less permission to change.”
When she was younger, Wilde says, every new stage—high school, college, a different city—felt like an opportunity for reinvention. She rejects the idea that people become less open to that because they’ve documented and published a record they’ll be held against as evidence of who they used to be.
Her view of commitment has shifted over time. Wilde’s first wedding was at 19 to an Italian aristocrat, held on a school bus with two witnesses. She says she’s now less sold on that sort of contract. “There is this sense of: ‘How dare you change!. You said at 24 you would like this kind of life and now you’re 44. How dare you want different things!’” Wilde says. “The most successful relationships I’ve observed have been people who seem to really be interested in the other person as they are today.”.
In the film, Piña says settling is shameful: people exist on crumbs, forgetting they deserve more. The piece says this philosophy comes directly from Perel and links to the psychotherapist’s upbringing by Holocaust survivors—“those who didn’t die. and those who came back to life.” Wilde says Perel’s drive comes from “having one life and how you better be living it authentically.”.
The film’s spiritual ancestors add another layer. The piece notes that Dr Ruth Westheimer. a much-loved US sex therapist. was also the daughter of European Jews sent to concentration camps. while both her parents were murdered. Norton nods and turns to the current moment of emotional strain. He says Perel’s husband, Jack Saul, is also a therapist specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder. “I talked about this with Esther,” Norton says. “We’re living in global trauma right now. We literally have genocide being live-streamed. Mechanised armies attacking civilian populations in Ukraine and Sudan. Masked, fascist goons shooting American citizens on the streets. This is the uber-text of what we’re getting mainlined into us. And trauma and violence and brutality are suppressive to eroticism.”.
So The Invite isn’t just “froth,” Norton argues. “It’s a tonic. ‘A kind of medicine.’ People feel unbelievably disconnected from their erotic selves in times like these. You feel bad about whingeing about your own lack of activation on an emotional. psychosexual level because the whole world is telling you: you’ve gotta just survive this horror.”.
He and Wilde look at each other and sigh. The piece ends in the small, human gesture: time for another massage, perhaps.
The Invite is in cinemas now.
Olivia Wilde Edward Norton The Invite Seth Rogen Penélope Cruz Sundance A24 sex comedy Esther Perel bed death marriage intimacy San Francisco