OLIVIA WILDE INTERVIEW
Women’s Health Magazine, November 2008.
Part -2
Her series of Sapphic smooches with Mischa Barton
in the second season of The O.C. launched this Washington, DC, native into the role of male fantasy fodder. (The steamy kisses have garnered 100,000-plus YouTube hits, and she says she still gets letters from sexually confused young women who consider Wilde a role model.) “When I kiss a girl for a part, people think it’s sexy. But if two guys kiss, suddenly there’s a backlash. It’s a double standard,” she says, munching on a guacamole pesto taco. “Honestly, I think we’re all bisexual in some way.”
And who would top Wilde’s own girl-on-girl tryst list? “Angelina Jolie, hands down! Just seeing an actress who has been through it all and who doesn’t care what other people say about her–someone who has forged her own path,” she says. Wilde met her crush at last year’s Golden Globes, where Jolie was up for her role as Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart: “I was sitting at her knees and talking about my parents [well-known international journalists Leslie and Andrew Cockburn] and how dangerous being a journalist in a foreign country can be,” she says. “Later, I was like, ‘Brad who?’ I didn’t even realize he was leaning over her shoulder the whole time. Everyone around her just disappeared.”
One guy Wilde has found impossible to ignore is her husband, Tao Ruspoli. Several years ago, she was feeling a bit turned off by L.A. guys–”they spend way more time looking in the mirror than I ever do,” she says–when a friend of her parents suggested a set-up. She bristled. “He wanted to introduce me to this Italian guy who made films and lived on a school bus. I said, ‘Whoa! I don’t want to meet a dude who lives on a bus!’” Turns out the guy was an Italian prince whose family owns a palazzo in Rome and a castle in Vignanello, Italy. He’s a filmmaker and documentarian; the bus is a mobile studio for a cinema collective he founded.
Within six months, the two had eloped–on the bus, no less. (They later had a proper wedding in Virginia.) Ruspoli was 27; Wilde, just 18. “My dad did have a minor heart attack, and it was hard to imagine settling down at the time,” she recalls. “But there was this wave of romantic excitement and an overwhelming sense that we were supposed to be family. We were very open to the idea that if it didn’t work, we would let it go its course. No pressure.” (A quick glance at her ring finger reveals a chunky gold band, not the honking emerald-cut rock favored by Hollywood
royalty.) Wilde gets a kick out of people’s first reaction to her titled spouse. “Everyone expects him to pick me up in a limo or a yacht,” she says. “Then Tao rolls up in this old Thunderbird, wearing flip-flops, his hair all crazy. People are like, ‘He’s a prince?’”
