Norton and Wilde on 'The Invite': A sex comedy that lets audiences speak the unspeakable

Edward Norton arrived in London after a red-eye from Los Angeles, exhausted enough that he booked a massage—something he hadn't done in years. Midway through, he nearly wept. The physical release caught him off guard. He's been hearing similar sounds from audiences watching his new film, The Invite, a comedy about what happens to desire inside a marriage. People emerge from screenings tearful, he says, laughing in a way that feels like recognition. "Most people feel alone inside the dysfunction of their relationship," Norton explains, sitting across from his co-star and director Olivia Wilde. "They worry it's only the two of them. Universality is a relief. It lets you forgive yourself."

Wilde nods. She knows the laugh he means—the one that sounds like relief, like a moan, like someone saying I thought I was the only one. When you hear yourself laugh at something that reveals a truth you've been keeping quiet, and then you hear someone else do it too, the shame lifts. The Invite traffics in this catharsis, though it offers no flattery. Wilde plays Angela, a frustrated artist married to a failed musician named Joe, played by Seth Rogen. They have a daughter, twelve years old, and almost nothing else in common. One evening when the girl is away, Angela invites the neighbors downstairs—Hawk, a smooth former firefighter played by Norton, and his girlfriend Piña, a therapist played by Penélope Cruz. The dinner does not go as planned. It's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with explicit sexual content.

The film draws its philosophy from Esther Perel, a Belgian-born psychotherapist based in Manhattan who served as a consultant. Perel's central idea—that all relationships end but can sometimes be rebooted with the same person—threads through the movie. So does her observation that bed death is not a personal failure but an inevitable product of American culture. Wilde is animated on this point. The American sense of duty, the puritanical roots that make pleasure shameful and admitting defeat even worse, these create a particular kind of trap. For women especially, marriage becomes an achievement, a contract that promises safety. Pleasure becomes secondary to holding the family together. Wilde, who has two children from her marriage to Jason Sudeikis, contrasts this with European attitudes. In France, a family with a small child signals those people are having sex. In America, a small child signals the end of sexual exploration, a shift toward a femininity rooted in duty and nurture rather than desire.

The Invite is based on a Spanish play that has already been adapted in Italy, Switzerland, France, and South Korea, but this American version feels distinctly American—set in San Francisco, channeling California's most famous sexologist, and workshopped extensively with screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. Norton and Rogen had already worked together on Sausage Party, an animated food orgy that shares The Invite's filthy DNA. The cast spent two weeks improvising, building trust. Norton was allowed to wing a crucial monologue about his character's name, a moment of spontaneity that amazed him. "Directors just don't say: 'Don't tell me what this key moment is going to be,'" he says. The film was shot chronologically on a single set over three weeks, which Norton believes gave the story an arc it could never have achieved if scenes were filmed out of order. "We would have been much more cautious," he says. "It had a really profound effect on the way the story layered up toward its finale."

Wilde, watching him, glows. "I feel both thrilled and ruined by this experience," she says, "because I don't know when I can possibly expect to have another one like this." The film premiered at Sundance in January and was sold to A24 for twelve million dollars after a bidding war. It has become a critical hit, a commercial success, and an awards contender—eclipsing even the reception for her 2019 directorial debut, Booksmart, and nearly erasing the memory of Don't Worry Darling, which satisfied almost no one. Wilde has been withering about the media scrutiny that followed her relationship with her co-star Harry Styles.

Wilde was surprised by her own performance, by things that erupted from her unplanned. There's a moment when Angela calls herself a "stupid fucking cunt" before reassuring Hawk that she's fine, it's just her inner monologue. Wilde says this was a tribute to Diane Keaton, to whom the film is dedicated. They played mother and daughter in Christmas with the Coopers, and Angela inherits Keaton's self-effacing brutality, her immediate awareness of her own absurdity. The line is the sweary descendant of Keaton's "what a jerk" monologue in Annie Hall, that generational moment when someone first said the quiet part out loud. The Invite asks its audience to do the same—to speak what's unspoken and stay spontaneous.

Norton blames our phones for some of the resistance to both. There's only one moment involving technology in the movie, and it's terrible. The film's nostalgia extends to its central setup: a hastily arranged dinner among near-strangers. "Now, our social worlds are heavily curated," Wilde says. "You gather with like-minded people. You screen your date before you meet them. You already know everything about them. The idea of collision with the unknown is completely foreign." Tech tells us we don't need other people. The pandemic told us to fear them. Intimacy requires risk and friction, things we're now sanitizing out of our lives. Social media stifles the evolution relationships need. "People have become brands," Wilde says. "Everyone has defined their brand. I wonder if having put a record out there of who you are means people are giving themselves less permission to change." When she was younger, each new stage—high school, college, a different city—was a chance to reinvent herself. Now people feel held hostage by their documented past.

Wilde was married at nineteen to an Italian aristocrat on a school bus with two witnesses. She's less convinced by that kind of contract now. "There's this sense of: 'How dare you change! You said at twenty-four you would like this kind of life and now you're forty-four. How dare you want different things!'" The most successful relationships she's observed are between people genuinely interested in who the other person is today. Norton brings the conversation back to Perel's roots—she was raised by Holocaust survivors, a group she divides into those who didn't die and those who came back to life. That sense of having one life and living it authentically drives her philosophy. Norton mentions that Perel's husband, Jack Saul, is also a therapist specializing in post-traumatic stress. "We're living in global trauma right now," Norton says. "Genocide being live-streamed. Mechanised armies attacking civilians. Fascist violence on American streets. Trauma and violence are suppressive to eroticism." So The Invite isn't just froth. It's medicine. People feel disconnected from their erotic selves in times like these, guilty for complaining about their own lack of activation when the world is telling them to just survive the horror. Norton and Wilde look at each other and sigh. The film, they suggest, is a tonic for that particular wound.