Four years after the release of Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde has finally spoken up about the drama surrounding the film’s release — including the infamous “spit-gate” moment between Chris Pine and Harry Styles. On the June 17 episode of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, Wilde set the record straight and answered the question so many of us were wondering: “Did Harry Styles really spit on Chris Pine?”
When it comes to the Don’t Worry Darling drama, it’s hard to know where to start. Between rumors of on-set feuds and rumors swirling about Wilde’s then-relationship with the star of the film, Harry Styles, the drama seemed to take over, both online and in Wilde’s personal life. “There was all this public madness, but my private life was very far from it, and very wholesome and sweet,” she told Cooper. “It was like the tornado was right outside the door, and if you were inside, you were like ‘it’s so nice,’ and then you open the door and it’s like … a cow on a tractor would fly by.”
One of the most talked-about moments during Don’t Worry Darling‘s drama-filled press run was “spit-gate.” ICYMI, the internet was set ablaze after a video circulated that appeared to show Harry Styles spitting on Chris Pine at the Venice Film Festival. In 2023, in a video accompanying an Esquire profile on Pine, he cleared up the entire rumor very simply: “Harry did not spit on me. Harry’s a very, very kind guy.”
Pine’s rep also came forward to deny the claims shortly after the incident. “Just to be clear, Harry Styles did NOT spit on Chris Pine. There is nothing but respect between these two men, and any suggestion otherwise is a blatant attempt to create drama that simply does not exist,” Pine’s rep told The Hollywood Reporter.
Still, that hasn’t stopped the internet from revisiting the incident every few months. In Wilde’s interview with Cooper, she recounts how, after returning from the press conference in Venice, she and her co-stars were shown the video and asked what had happened. “We were like, OK, fair enough, that looks [like it]. It was like this weird optical illusion, but the fact that then it turned into this massive thing, I was like ‘OK, we’ve turned into a world of like complete surrealism.’”
During this time, Wilde was also facing scrutiny from the general public over most aspects of her life, including her relationships with her co-stars and even the way she dressed. “I wanted to be like, ‘Can I just talk to people? Can I just go and say like that’s not true!’ and it was like ‘no that won’t help,’ and that was really hard.”
And with Wilde addressing the Don’t Worry Darling drama all these years later, many internet users feel like they’re back in 2022 — and some are even amazed that Wilde mentioned it at all.
But, if you needed any confirmation that spit-gate didn’t happen… here you go. Now, hopefully, we can all lay it to rest.