‘House’ feels like home to Olivia Wilde
By John Crook
- ZAP2IT
Updated: 04/24/08 8:38 AM
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- Olivia Wilde plays one of the doctors trying to make the medical team on “House.”
Auditions are seldom a favorite part of any actor’s job, but Olivia Wilde says she enjoyed the whole process of becoming a new regular on “House,” the hit Fox medical drama returning with new episodes starting at 9 p. m. Mon-day.
It could have been a real ordeal. As “Thirteen,” the nickname by which her character is known on the show, Wilde and several other actors played young doctors battling for a limited number of spots on the medical team of Dr. Greg House (Hugh Laurie). And, in a case of life imitating art, Wilde and the other newbies weren’t sure which of them would be selected to become new regulars.
“We all had different deals, so we knew we had a certain number of episodes, but we didn’t know beyond that point who would stay and who would go,” says Wilde, 24. “Once it got to that point where we were having to wait until the next script to see who would disappear, it became an interesting environment. What was so great about our group is that no one approached it in a negative way. The only way to deal with that kind of tension in the air was to joke about it constantly.
“It was great, because none of us was taking any moment for granted. That happens a lot in television, where you forget that you are incredibly lucky to have a role and you should continually be working to develop it. We felt that we were constantly having to prove ourselves, which means that we were all probably working harder than we would have been otherwise.”
Mastering her character’s technical jargon and adjusting to a fast-paced series where the focus is on the puzzling case of the week were challenges, Wilde says, but she looks to series star Laurie as an example of how to keep her priorities straight.
“It’s extraordinary to watch an actor who takes so many risks,” she says.
If her “House” work is rewarding, her first network series role, in the short-lived 2003-04 Fox drama “Skin,” was valuable mainly as a learning experience. As the ingenue lead in this “Romeo and Juliet” story set against the backdrop of the porn industry, Wilde was touted by Fox flacks as the Next Big Thing, but all the attention went “pffft” once the show tanked.
“When I look at young actresses who are on instant hit shows, I sort of feel for them. God forbid there is some kind of failure, because they won’t be as well equipped to deal with that. When ‘Skin’ failed, it was a disappointment, but also a relief, because suddenly I was a teen again and not having to get up at 4 a. m. every day and working myself to death. In the end it was a much-needed break and a wonderful lesson, and of course it launched my career.”
The daughter of writers and documentary filmmakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Wilde was born in New York but grew up mainly in the Washington, D. C., area, graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. She says she has known since she was 5 years old that she wanted to be an actress.
“It was either that or the nuthouse,” Wilde says, laughing. “I remember seeing my first episode of ‘Saturday Night Live’ and asking my mother what those people were doing, and she said, ‘They’re actors.’ I said, ‘They get paid to do that? Sign me up!’ I started seeing a lot of theater and becoming engrossed in it, and I was just so excited that there was a profession that involved all of those things.”
After high school, which included a period of study at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, Ireland, Wilde took off a year before planning to start college and traveled to Los Angeles, where she quickly began to find work.
After “Skin,” she had a better experience on “The O. C.,” where she played Alex Kelly, a bisexual beauty who dated both Seth Cohen (Adam Brody) and Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton). She had a great time on the show, she says, although she hadn’t realized she was joining a pop culture phenomenon.
In 2007, Wilde followed up her 13-episode “O. C.” gig with “The Black Donnellys,” another short-lived drama she nonetheless calls “one of the most extraordinary working experiences of my life. Being directed by Paul Haggis (‘Crash’) changed me as an actor entirely, as did working with the other actors as well.”
Married since 2003 to filmmaker Tao Ruspoli, Wilde recently collaborated with her husband on “Fix,” a darkly comic movie that premiered at Slamdance and currently is attracting major buzz on the U. S. film festival circuit.
