Earlier this week, Edward Norton took a night flight from Los Angeles to London and felt so dreadful the next day he decided to get a massage. “I hadn’t had one in such a long time,” he says, “and I almost started crying. You’re like: ‘Oh! Ah!’”
He has heard similar sounds from cinemas screening his new movie, The Invite, which is about the devastating impact of marriage on your sex life. “People are almost tearful. They’re like: ‘I haven’t had a good, adult laugh that made me feel seen in a long time.’”
He grins, all tan and relaxation. “Most people feel alone inside the dysfunction of their relationship – worried it’s only the two of you having these problems. Universality is a relief. It lets you forgive yourself a lot.”
Next to him nods Olivia Wilde, his co-star and director. “My favourite audience laugh,” she says, “is that which seems to say: ‘I thought I was the only one!’ It’s like ha-ha-ha-aaah; a little bit of a moan. When you hear yourself laugh at something that feels revealing, and then someone else does so too, the quiet shame you felt is immediately relieved.”
Seeing and feeling seen by The Invite is cathartic. It’s also far from flattering. Wilde plays Angela, a frustrated artist married to failed musician Joe (Seth Rogen). They share a 12-year-old but not much else. When their daughter is on a sleepover, Angela asks the upstairs neighbours – smooth former firefighter Hawk (Norton) and his girlfriend, Piña, a therapist played by Penélope Cruz – down for supper. It is not a spoiler to say the evening does not go well, or as predicted. Think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with extra pegging.
Of the four characters, only Piña is someone you might actually aspire to be, probably because she is a proxy for the film’s consultant: Belgium-born, Manhattan-based psychotherapist Esther Perel. Piña voices many of Perel’s key theories – most pertinently that all relationships end but can sometimes be rebooted with the same person. One Perel idea, which isn’t spoken aloud but seems to hover significantly, is that “bed death” is an inevitable byproduct of the American dream.
Yes, says Wilde keenly. “It’s that American sense of duty: I have begun this marriage, I will complete it, I will muscle through. The puritanical roots of our culture mean it’s not only shameful to value pleasure, but also to admit defeat.”
For women in such a society, she says, there remains “a sense of achievement in marriage. You have signed a contract that will keep you safe and feels like success. Pleasure and your continuing exploration of it is secondary to keeping the family unit intact.”
Wilde and Norton each have two children; she with her ex-husband, Jason Sudeikis, he with his wife of 14 years, producer Shauna Robertson. “When one sees a family with a small child in France,” Wilde continues, paraphrasing Perel, “the suggestion is that those people are having sex, which is what led to this child. In America, it’s like: those people are not having sex because they have a small child. That inherently signals the end of sexual exploration and the focus around a very different sense of femininity much more rooted in duty and nurture.”
The Invite feels very US-specific, despite being based on a Spanish play that has already been turned into movies in Italy, Switzerland, France and South Korea. That’s because as well as the film being set in San Francisco and channelling California’s favourite sexologist, the cast workshopped the script for a fortnight with screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack.
Adding their own hangups to the mix was easy and unexposing, says Norton. “There was a lot of pre-existing comfort and trust” – they already knew each other; he and Rogen previously collaborated on food orgy animation Sausage Party, with which The Invite shares some filthy DNA. There was a lot of improvisation: very funny jokes, slapstick, even a devastating speech in which Hawk explains the origins of his name. Norton remains amazed Wilde let him wing that bit. “Directors just don’t say: ‘Don’t tell me what this key moment is going to be.’” Especially if you’re shooting on 35mm. “Actually, I’m kind of amazed that Seth was OK with it. Seth is a very methodical and mechanical craftsperson.”
More than a year on, Norton, 56, still seems buzzing from the shoot. He keeps creasing up and sharing his favourite lines. He talks about getting “into a flow state” and the “exuberant feelings” as they twigged it was all coming together. A jazz quartet metaphor gets an airing. He has made more than 50 movies, he says, but this was the first filmed chronologically (on a single set, over about three weeks).
“It would never, ever have had that arc if it had been shot out of sequence. We would have been much more cautious. It had a really profound effect on the way the story layered up toward its finale.”
Wilde beams at him, her striking, angular Bambi face glowing. “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. To have a group of people so in sync. I do have that feeling that if I never made anything else, I’d be OK.”
The Invite is unlikely to be her final film. Following its premiere at Sundance in January, it was sold to A24 for $12m (£9m) after a bidding war and is now a critical hit, a commercial sensation and an awards contender. It trumps even the ecstatic reception afforded Wilde’s 2019 directorial debut, Booksmart, and nearly wipes the memory of her follow-up, Don’t Worry Darling (2022), which pleased neither reviewers, audiences nor Harry Styles fans (Wilde and her co-star dated for a couple of years; she has been withering about the bleak media scrutiny).
“I’m a believer in the idea of using storytelling to experience emotions that no amount of therapy can unearth completely,” says Wilde. “I was surprised by my own performance, because things were sort of erupting from me that I didn’t plan for.”
Among these was the moment Angela calls herself a “stupid fucking cunt” before reassuring Hawk that she’s fine; it’s just her inner monologue. That, says Wilde, was a roundabout tribute to the late Diane Keaton, to whom the movie is dedicated.
“She was probably the most self-effacing person I’ve ever encountered. Certainly within so many of her great roles she had this immediate awareness of oneself in a way that is brutal and so vulnerable.” They played mother and daughter on 2015’s Christmas with the Coopers, and Angela inherits much from Keaton, just as the film mines Woody Allen’s best bickery comedies and the prickliest Mike Nichols.
The “cunt” line, then, is the sweary heir of Keaton’s “what a jerk” ramble in Annie Hall’s post-tennis scene – a scene, says Norton, that not only includes the first “la-di-da”, and the first sight of Keaton’s classic hat-tie-waistcoat-slacks outfit (elements of which Wilde has today adopted), but also “a generational moment in that it was the first person doing the inner monologue, saying the quiet part out loud”.
The Invite solicits its audience to speak the unspoken and – Keaton’s killer gift – stay spontaneous. Resistance to both, says Norton, is partly the fault “of what these things” – he jabs at his phone – “are doing to us psychosexually”. There’s only one moment involving tech in the movie, and it’s awful. That absence adds to the movie’s air of nostalgia, as does its central setup: a hastily arranged knees-up of near-strangers. “Now, our social worlds are heavily curated,” says Wilde. “You gather in groups of like-minded people. You screen your date before you meet them. You already know everything about them. The idea, today, of collision with the unknown is completely foreign.”
It is also, she adds, scary. Tech tells us we don’t need other people. “And we’re still unwinding from Covid, which told us to fear the other, and embrace isolationism. Intimacy involves risk, friction – all these things that now we are completely sanitising our lives of.”
Plus, says Wilde, warming further, social media stifles exactly the evolution needed to keep relationships perky. “People have become brands. Everyone has defined said brand. I wonder if having put a record out there of who you are, and what your interests are, means people are giving themselves less permission to change.”
When she was younger, every new stage – high school, college, a different city – was an opportunity for reinvention. “I hate the idea that people feel less open to that because they’ve documented a published record that they will be held against as evidence of their former selves.”
Wilde’s first wedding was at 19, to an Italian aristocrat, on a school bus with two witnesses. Today, she is less sold on that sort of contract. “There is this sense of: ‘How dare you change! You said at 24 you would like this kind of life and now you’re 44. How dare you want different things!’ The most successful relationships I’ve observed have been people who seem to really be interested in the other person as they are today.”
Settling is shameful, says Piña in the film: people exist on crumbs, forgetting they deserve more. This is lifted pretty wholesale from Perel and is a philosophy whose roots the psychotherapist has put down to being raised by Holocaust survivors – a group she divides into “those who didn’t die, and those who came back to life”.
“This sense of having one life and how you better be living it authentically is absolutely what seems to drive her,” says Wilde. It’s curious, I say, that Perel’s spiritual ancestor, the much-loved US sex therapist Dr Ruth Westheimer, was also the daughter of European Jews sent to concentration camps – though both of her parents were murdered.
Norton nods into his coffee. Did I know, he says, that Perel’s husband, Jack Saul, is also a therapist and specialises in post-traumatic stress disorder? “I talked about this with Esther,” he says. “We’re living in global trauma right now. We literally have genocide being live-streamed. Mechanised armies attacking civilian populations in Ukraine and Sudan. Masked, fascist goons shooting American citizens on the streets. This is the uber-text of what we’re getting mainlined into us. And trauma and violence and brutality are suppressive to eroticism.”
So the Invite isn’t just froth, he says – it’s a tonic. “A kind of medicine. People feel unbelievably disconnected from their erotic selves in times like these. You feel bad about whingeing about your own lack of activation on an emotional, psychosexual level because the whole world is telling you: you’ve gotta just survive this horror.”
He and Wilde look at each other and sigh. Time for another massage, perhaps.
The Invite is in cinemas now
