Olivia Wilde was babysat by Christopher Hitchens. Richard Holbrooke and Peter Jennings were family friends. She is married to Italian royalty and has been known to take phone calls from Barack Obama. And the star of ‘House’ also happens to look, well, like THIS.
Wilde, 25, is not at the point where the paparazzi chase her into vintage-clothing stores and prowl for her burrito wrappers in the trash. But there’s a sense that her moment, if not imminent, is coming. “From minute one, I thought, That girl is going to be a huge star,” says the producer Josh Schwartz, who gave Wilde her first major break, casting her as Mischa Barton’s bisexual love interest in the teen soap The OC. Justin Timberlake, who starred opposite Wilde in the 2006 true-life caper Alpha Dog, raves that she “has all the qualities of an actress who’s going to have a long career.” Hugh Laurie, the star of the misanthropic medical drama House—on which Wilde now plays a key role as a mysterious young doctor named Thirteen—is equally charmed. “Right from the first day, Olivia was pretty hard to ignore,” Laurie says.
Next year Wilde’s stature will rise to new heights with her role opposite Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy, a “reimagining” of the cultishly popular 1982 video-game movie. Tron: Legacy isn’t due until 2010, but the project hijacked this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego with a few minutes of moodily electrifying footage.
“I’m definitely at this point now where things are shifting, they’re changing very fast,” Wilde says cautiously, as a shifty guy nearby checks his iPhone e-mail or sends a snapshot to Perez Hilton. “The only role I really don’t understand is this recent sort of ‘sexiest-vixen’ thing. It doesn’t feel like me, doesn’t feel natural.”
Yes: the sexiest-vixen thing. Not long ago, the actress Megan Fox gushed that Wilde was so sexy it made her “want to strangle a mountain ox,” and given Fox’s own babe-osity, the effect was not unlike having Oprah plotz over a debut novel. Soon after, Wilde was ranked number one in Maxim’s Hot 100 list of the most beautiful women in the world, an honor that flattered but made her reach for the stemware. “The day they announced it, I hid in my bathtub with a big glass of wine,” she says. “Anytime anyone describes you with a superlative, people are going to disagree. And I didn’t want to have to deal with those people.”
Wilde, of course, is not the first young actress to feel awkward in the face of babedom. It’s not as if she isn’t an active co-conspirator—I mean, hello, photo to your right. Babedom can help. But there’s always the risk of it becoming who she is and overshadowing the rest, like the part that canvassed door-to-door for Barack Obama, fund-raises for the ACLU, and can be found reading 600-page books on Iraq.
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