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FREEZER BURN

Actress Brutally Mocks A-Listers With Botox

The comments come just weeks after she was criticized for her “terrible” red-carpet appearance.

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

PublishedJun 29, 2026, 2:03 PM EDT

UpdatedJun 29, 2026, 2:03 PM EDT

Updated Jun 29, 2026, 2:03 PM EDTPublished Jun 29, 2026, 2:03 PM EDT

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Olivia Wilde offered her unfiltered opinion on actors whose faces appear filtered due to cosmetic enhancements.

On Thursday, the 42-year-old House actress and director reflected on the difficulty of finding expressive actresses on The Run-Through with Vogue podcast.

“It’s interesting because as a director, I now am constantly searching for actresses who can still move their faces,” Wilde said, adding, “And it’s not easy.”

Wilde made her feature-length directorial debut in 2019 with her coming-of-age comedy Booksmart, and has since directed the 2022 psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling and the Penélope Cruz-starred comedy The Invite, which hit theaters on Friday.

“I don’t blame them,” Wilde said of her fellow actresses. “I am a product of the same machine. I am under the same pressures. I get it.”

Wilde shared that she hoped less invasive treatments would become available.

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“I just pray for technology to allow for treatments that just aren’t so aggressive. There’s something so medieval about a lot of these things,” she said.

Adding, “Can someone come up with something better than Botox that just doesn’t force us to do these things? Because then I’d rather do that.”

The pressures and expectations around beauty and youth for women in Hollywood are notoriously high, which can naturally lead A-listers to seek out cosmetic enhancements.

In recent years, however, some uncannily stiff faces on screen have sparked online commentary around Botox “ruining” acting.

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Multiple actresses, like Kaley Cuoco, Nicole Kidman, and Debi Mazar, have shared that they experimented with the neurotoxin injection, but did not like how it affected their ability to move their faces.

Wilde explained that the challenge for actresses is that their faces have to be expressive on camera, but frozen in time on the red carpet: “I think that it’s a thing [for] actors particularly. The struggle is that [it] is your instrument, you have to be able to use it, but then you have to go on a carpet.”

Wilde also reflected on her personal experiences with reading comments about her appearance.

“I’ve had the thing of people being like, ‘She looks old and dead and awful,’ and you’re like, ‘How do you win?’ It’s impossible,” she said.

In April, Wilde was the target of endless online memes and health concerns over her “gaunt” appearance after giving a red carpet interview at the 2026 SFFILM Festival in San Francisco.

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A clip of the interview, shot on a wide-angle setting, sparked conservative commentator Megyn Kelly to call Wilde “less hot than ever” in a segment of her radio show, The Megyn Kelly Show.

“She looks like she should go into a hospital right now, because she looks like a corpse with the very swollen eyes, like the eyeballs sticking out the way they do on a true anorexic,” Kelly said.

CLEARING THE AIR

Olivia Wilde Reacts to Controversy Over Viral 'Gollum' Video

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Kelly’s comments caused Wilde to publish a video on her Instagram, in which she laughed and declared, “I’m not dead!”

In June, Wilde commented on the incident in an interview with The Cut, saying, “It was a terrible image. I did look like Gollum.”

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

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