What are all these Don't Worry Darling jokes?
An explainer from your wine aunt
It has come to my attention that not everyone knows the whole story behind why the Don’t Worry Darling premiere was the talk of the internet today. Lucky for you guys, I have crushes on Florence Pugh and Chris Pine, and I’ve been paying attention to this movie since it was filming in 2020 (it may have been the first major movie to go back into production post-pandemic, but don’t quote me on that.)
Others were excited about it because they loved Olivia Wilde’s direction of Booksmart, a movie I liked half of. And still others had the film on their radar because of Harry Styles, who many people who are not me find attractive and charming.
In early 2021, it came out that Olivia and Harry were dating, to which most people said, Sure, happy for them. Hey, you know there’s a global pandemic, right?
But since then, there have been questions about the timeline of Olivia’s breakup with her previous partner Jason Sukodu, who is in that show that everyone loves and I refuse to get AppleTV for, and the beginning of her relationship with Harry.*
This brings us to the current shitshow. It starts, as many shitshows do, with Harry Styles’ fans, who have their bloomers in a bunch that their little meow meow is dating a woman [who is ten years older than him, who was also his boss, who was also maybe still in a relationship when they got together]. Stuff in brackets because, while it's problematic, those little shits would still be trying to destroy her life if she was a virgin born on the exact same day as him.
Except they managed to actually find some good goss, which was that Florence Pugh was doing ZERO digital promo for the movie. She wasn't even liking Instagram posts that Olivia tagged her in.
(Blanket TW for misogyny in links. There’s a strong assumption that Harry was somehow involved in the rift between the two women, but there’s no direct evidence and also I refuse to believe that little ferret-man has that much power.)
That all could have been just internet wank, but then press for the movie started and Olivia sang Florence's praises, and Florence...didn't mention Olivia at all. Then Olivia gave an interview where she said she fired Shia LeBeouf to "protect" Florence, thus dragging shit-gibbon Shia the Beef into the fray. He sent texts and a video message to the magazine that interviewed Olivia proving that he left the movie of his own free will, and was not fired. Flo continued to have NO COMMENT WHATSOEVER.
This brings us to the Venice Film Festival, where the movie premiered today. Ahead of the festival, Florence's representatives were like, "Hey, so, she's really busy filming Dune 2? So, uh, she won't be doing any press junkets for the film. She'll only be at Venice." And THEN yesterday it came out that she was skipping the movie's press conference and ONLY walking the red carpet because “her flight was coming in late.” Y’all, Timothee Chamois is literally the star of Dune 2 and he spent four days in Venice.
Anyway, this movie is about to be released into theaters with one of its stars doing literally zero promotion for it, something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen in the 21st century. DWD is a Warner Bros movie, and so is Dune 2, so she clearly has the studio’s ok. How she got it is one of the big mysteries here.
The other one is that, despite all sorts of speculation (it was the relationship with Harry, Olivia was an unprofessional director, Florence felt like she was thrown under the bus with the Shia situation) no one actually knows for sure what caused the falling out between them. Olivia is keeping up appearances, Florence is radio silent, Harry has yet to put together a sentence that makes sense, and Chris Pine and Gemma Chan are floating along like graceful swan hostages.
If nothing else, Pine and Pugh were delighted to see each other, which made my little fangirl heart happy.
*A sideshow to the shitshow is that the custody battle between Wilde and Sudoku has become increasingly public and unpleasant, but that’s not funny; just sad for their kids.