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CLEARING THE AIR

Olivia Wilde Reacts to Viral ‘Gollum’ Video That Sparked Ozempic Rumors

The “House” actress called a widely circulated screenshot from the video a “terrible image.”

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

PublishedJun 24, 2026, 2:21 PM EDT

UpdatedJun 24, 2026, 2:24 PM EDT

Updated Jun 24, 2026, 2:24 PM EDTPublished Jun 24, 2026, 2:21 PM EDT

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Actress and director Olivia Wilde chimed in on a viral image that sparked worry over her health and drew unflattering comparisons to a J.R.R. Tolkien character.

On April 24, the 42-year-old actress gave a red carpet interview to SFGate at the 2026 SFFILM Festival in San Francisco. In a clip published on TikTok, the House star was happily discussing her upcoming comedy film, The Invite—in theaters on June 26—but it was her appearance that drew thousands of comments.

A widely circulated screenshot from SFGate’s video showed the actress’s gaunt appearance, leading social media users to liken her to the eerie, ravenous The Lord of the Rings character Gollum and voice concerns over her health.

The highly publicized demise of Wilde’s relationship with Ted Lasso star Jason Sudeikis, with whom she shares two children, fueled previous rumors regarding her emotional well-being. The couple, who dated for nine years and were engaged for seven, split up in 2020, and in 2022, Wilde was infamously served child custody papers onstage at CinemaCon.

Despite the breakup having happened years earlier, some online spectators linked it to her appearance in the viral 2026 SFGate video.

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Fans thought Wilde may be experiencing “temporal wasting,” a possible sign of malnutrition. Others suggested she was using the popular appetite-suppressing drug Ozempic or another GLP-1 medication.

On Wednesday, Wilde told The Cut how she really felt about the ordeal.

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“It was a terrible image,” she said, and, further agreeing with the online comments, added, “I did look like Gollum.”

Earlier this May, Wilde addressed the discourse in an Instagram video, in which she laughed. “Listen, that is a fisheye lens,” she remarked in the social media post. “I’m not dead!”

Now, she revealed her straightforward response was driven by two factors: she had enjoyed multiple classes of wine, and conservative commentator Megyn Kelly had compared her appearance to that of a corpse.

On April 30, Kelly said on her SiriusXM The Megyn Kelly Show that Wilde was “less hot than ever.”

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“She looks skeletal,” Kelly said. “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. There is nothing left but skin and bones.”

Adding, “She certainly looks like she’s on Ozempic.”

On June 17, Wilde also addressed the image on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast.

The actress stated that she had seen the photo right after the interview was posted, but thought “no one’s going to see this.”

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“And then suddenly it was f---ing everywhere,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”

The video was taken in a wide-angle setting that distorted the image, and Wilde recalled thinking, “Oh no, but that is not how I actually look.”

Wilde said she was able to laugh about the whole thing with her friends.

“I mean, the thing that is great about having really good friends is that they are the ones who laugh the hardest,” she said.

In the podcast episode, Wilde also discussed aging in her industry.

“I imagine it’s the same for like athletes that there is this ticking clock. And it is like, ‘Well, I better enjoy this because by the time I hit like 35, I’m a geriatric,’” she said.

Becoming a director eased her fear of aging.

“As a director, you are more valuable the more experience you have,” she explained. “And I loved the idea of like, I’ve shifted into something that I can grow old in, [it] made me really excited as opposed to being anxious about getting older.”

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Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

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