A ROMANCE OF THE NEAR FUTURE

The looks and all that shit can be handled. On any given night, you can bump into 50 women with movie star/model looks (who may actually be movie stars or models) just walking blindfolded down Abbot-Kinney—where Olivia Wilde conveniently (for her, since she lives around the corner) meets for an early Friday dinner on a cold October eve. The looks are easy. It’s the other stuff that’s going to make this difficult. So, damn you, Ms. Wilde, for being smart, funny, passionate, compassionate, interesting, easygoing, and, to top it all off, for having cheekbones even the wildest Irish rose could only dream of. This is the stuff that makes you want to care and not just stare off into the distance while actor X prattles on about his or her art. There’s a word for it—oh, yes, charming. That’s what she’s got, charm. And, like all charismatics, it starts with her eyes. Olivia Wilde née Cockburn may have chosen her stage name in honor of Oscar, but it’s also a double entendre betrayed by her eyes. Alert, alive. Fierce and playful. Confident. Dancing, like a ballerina or a boxer. They’re ready for war, peace, or just a laugh. Even before the waiter arrives to take your drink order, it’s all there on the table. Up to you. Damn her again.

At first I’m thinking I want war. To explain, the drive from the eastside has been a bitch. I’m tired as fuck and missing a friend’s art show to do an interview with a fatuous, young Ho’wood type (so I think) because of... Plus, the whitewashed, faux-boho stretch of Venice where we’re having dinner gives me a rash. (Of course, like all good bohos, Olivia and her husband were here when it was still… etc., etc.). And, the restaurant is one of those overly crowded, overly clattering, celeb-heaven clusterfucks where you couldn’t slide an Olsen twin between tables.

If I sound like a hater, that’s not it. I’m just old. And it’s dark in here. And the menu is in six-point type. Oh, and did I mention Wilde is married? Happily so. To a guy named Tao (I’m not making that up) who is the son of an Italian prince (that either), with whom she eloped at 18, when he was 27 (nor that). Okay, maybe I am a hater. But, really, given all that, where’s the fun going to come from? Wilde is drinking a glass of red when I arrive. The waiter asks if I’d care for some wine as well. I say no and ask for a double espresso and a non-alcoholic beer. “What do you call that, espresso and beer?” Olivia asks. 

“An ulcer,” I say.

She laughs, guffaws really, a loud, natural good-times gal laugh. And… damn her once more—she’s already disarming. Since I can’t read the menu, I ask her if she has any recommendations. “Well, you’re not into wine, so already we’re on different pages. I don’t know if I can make any recommendations,” she teases. She orders okra and avocado salad and cauliflower and something called mushroom toast.

“So, you’re a vegetarian,” I astutely ask.

“Yes.”

“How come you’re not skinnier?”

“Ha,” she snorts. “Umm, because I’m married to an Italian and every time I ask him to cook dinner, you can be a hundred-percent sure it’s going to be pasta. Anyway, there are a lot of fat vegetarians out there.”

“And angry ones, too.”

“Angry ones, too. The angriest ones are the raw foodists. You’ll never meet more anal, dogmatic people.”

So, now I’m thinking, better pay attention, this could be fun. I might even learn something. And I know what a self-involved boor I sound like saying that, but please forgive. I can only provide my context to this matter, not yours, and I’m not a faker, and the truth is, until yesterday, when I saw the screening of a movie starring Russell Crowe called The Next Three Days, in which Wilde has a cameo, I’d never seen the young lady on the big or medium screen.

A little surfing on the small screen, though, caught me up on a few things. I find that Wilde starred in The Black Donnellys, an ill-fated TV series by Paul Haggis, who also wrote and directed The Next Three Days, not to mention In The Valley of Elah and Crash and a shitload of TV shows from Diff’rent Strokes to Walker, Texas Ranger. Wilde also had a role on the much-missed The O.C. (“My Hilary Swank year,” she jokes.), is on leave from House, and has been shooting a bunch of movies, one of them called Cowboys and Aliens and another called Tron: Legacy.

Also, I discover, Maxim magazine named her the hottest of its Hot 100 a couple years ago. And she appeared in various states of flexible undress for a GQ cover story called, “Why We’re Wild About Olivia Wilde” (get it?). Oh, and Megan Fox said she’d love to make out with her. All of which, somehow, a generational slip perhaps, had passed me by.

Which is all fine and what you’d expect, but dig a little deeper, just past the glossy depths of commodification, and you come across a website for Artists for Peace and Justice, on whose board of directors Wilde sits alongside Haggis, Ben Stiller, Dr. Bob Arnot, and Dr. Reza Nabavian. These guys are working with a saint of a man, Father Rick Frechette, who has been working in the slums of Haiti for more than 20 years. Father Rick, as Olivia calls him, started as a priest and saw that what the slums around Port-au-Prince, among the poorest places in the western hemisphere, really needed were doctors. So, he became a doctor, built orphanages, medical clinics, street schools and a pediatric hospital. Folks like this still walk the earth. 

With funding help from APJ, Father Rick is opening a new school for the poor in Port-Au-Prince, and this is what Wilde is really excited about. “Two hundred kids, seventh grade,” she says. “It’s the first secondary school for kids in the slums of Port-au-Prince. Before, if you were lucky enough to get through the sixth grade through some free education program, there was nothing else for you.” The school will provide two meals, clean water, medical assistance and a safe place for kids to learn in and maybe even learn to hope for a viable future. APJ plans to expand the school through grade 13, and hold classes in arts education, sports, agriculture, and vocational training using local resources and labor.

“Our goal is also to encourage a sense of nationalism and pride that will stop the brain drain so people can get educated, go to med school, or any other kind of school elsewhere, but have a sense of responsibility to come back there and help their own country. That’s woven into the fabric of our curriculum.” Wilde gets increasingly animated talking about this, waving her hands frenetically as she speaks. And they are strangely big, sturdy hands—potato-picking hands we call them in the old country. I tell her I’m afraid she’s going to swat me with one of those mitts.

“Ha,” she laughs. “I know. I’m a hand talker. I’m surprised I haven’t knocked anything over yet.”

“That’s what you get for marrying an Italian.”

I ask Wilde how often she goes to Haiti.

“I go there any time I have time off,” she says. “It’s really an incredible place to go.” She says she stays in the local hospital when she goes to Port-au-Prince and does whatever is needed—load rice onto trucks, distribute food.

“How long do you stay when you go?”

“As long as I can. To me, the longer you stay, the more helpful you can be, the better the experience. I encourage people to go there to see it for themselves,” she says. “And I always feel safe there, by the way.”

“And Sean Penn is there,” I add.

“Yes,” Wilde laughs. “Sean Penn is there to protect you. He’s doing incredible stuff. I toured his camp and was really impressed. “

Having spent some time with Sean Penn, it doesn’t surprise me. He’s really pretty amazing, I suggest.

“Quite brilliant,” Wilde agrees. “I didn’t realize how brilliant he was until I was in Haiti hearing him explain the politics of his camp. He’s pretty fascinating, genuinely interested in the history of Haiti and Haiti’s people.”

Wilde is also quite active in domestic politics. She put serious work in on Obama’s election and now is focused on the midterm elections, which, depending on when you read this article, may have already wreaked their havoc.

“I’m very concerned at this point about the midterm elections,” Wilde says. “People generally don’t vote in them. What is at stake is so enormous, and I don’t feel people have a sense of that and it’s scary.”

I suggest that people might be dismayed by how lame the Democrats have been with the “change” mandate they were handed in the last general election, choosing tame and watered-down policies over real progressive politics (like the administration’s challenge of the court order striking down the unconscionable Don’t Ask Don’t Tell).

“It doesn’t matter. We need to rally the way they rally. It’s time to go gangster,” she counters. “I’m worried the disappointment you feel might lead people to lose a sense of responsibility and not involve themselves and not vote.” 

To help counteract that, Wilde has been doing get-the-vote-out campaigns, including a video with MoveOn.org holding people accountable for what happens in the election if they don’t vote.

Her activism really isn’t that surprising given her heritage. Her mother, Leslie

Cockburn, is a 60 Minutes producer and journalist, and her father, Andrew Cockburn, is also a journalist. Both her paternal uncles are journalists as well, and all the lads contribute to the muckraking website CounterPunch.org. Wilde’s paternal grandfather, Claud Cockburn was a well-known novelist and journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War and was known to be sympathetic to the communists fighting for the republicans against Franco and the nationalist takeover of the Spanish Republic. His cousin was the British novelist Evelyn Waugh. It’s a fascinating family of letters and activism. Wilde’s older sister is a civil-rights attorney in New York. So, perhaps what’s surprising is that Olivia Wilde ended up an actor first and an activist second. I ask how this happened.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It [acting] came to me. Acting, for me, as a kid, was like therapy. I was a really angry child.” I ask her what a beautiful, intelligent, well-educated woman with admittedly loving and supportive parents had to be angry about. But before I can answer, my lamb arrives and I immediately feel ashamed and apologize.

“What an asshole you are. I’m going to make lamb noises while you eat,” she jokes and tells me the lamb is the restaurants’ specialty, which is good, because ambience certainly isn’t.

“You know,” she continues, “when I say angry, I think it was more—because I had really loving parents—when I was a kid, I had all this unfocused energy that would come out in bouts of excitement or rage or in the form of a really overactive imagination, constantly coming up with alternate realities. My energy was such that I think that if I had other parents, I quite possibly would have been medicated. I was really frenetic. [And, yes, those big hands are flying around as she speaks.] The theater really calmed me and focused me, and to this day, I don’t think I could live without it. It’s my therapy.”

Therapy has been fruitful. Besides getting to work with Russell Crowe in the new Haggis movie (“At times it was distracting how good he is,” she says of Crowe.), Wilde makes her sci-fi, action-movie, fanboy’s fantasy debut in the forthcoming Tron sequel.

For the uninitiated, Tron was a little seen, but highly influential, film released in 1982, starring Jeff Bridges. Its plot is too Byzantine and techie for me to comprehend, but it has something with computers taking over. Along with Blade Runner, released the same year, it’s considered one of the wellsprings of such franchises as The Terminator and The Matrix, etc. Tron was also one of the first films to incorporate extensive computer graphics, and director Steven Lisberger’s unique visual style influenced a generation of artists. Video games, a television series, and now the remake have followed in its footsteps. But, most importantly, “Daft Punk based their entire aesthetic on Tron,” exclaims Wilde. Almost as important, Daft Punk is scoring the new Tron. Wilde adds that the sequel has taken so long to get into production because Disney “wanted it to be as revolutionary as the first.” Wilde plays the film’s heroine, Quorra.

I ask her what she thinks about the action-movie world.

“I never thought I’d be in an action movie,” she says, “but I gotta say, I love it. I love the stunts. I love the physicality. I love the imagination necessary for the green screen. I think the technology is brilliant. I’m completely inspired by the people behind it, meaning the artists who are tirelessly painting images. I think it’s brilliant.”

I suggest it sounds like being part of a theatre group.

“Exactly,” she says, adding that she’s never seen such high morale within every department working on a film, “Because they felt like they were part of doing something revolutionary. It was mind blowing.”

“Do you save the world?”

“Yep,” she laughs.

And, by now, I’m not the least bit surprised.