Olivia Wilde Clears Up If She Fired Shia LaBeouf or If He Quit 'Don't Worry Darling'

“It must be particularly frustrating to have people talking about a lot of things that aren’t the film itself,” Stephen said. “Oh, are they?” Olivia jokingly responded.

She then added, “The whole experience has sort of changed my way of thinking about the internet and how we chose to interact with it- or not. But, really, it’s kind of ironic, because all of this is really what the film’s about. The film is about the narratives we are fed and whether we chose to accept them or question their sources.”

Olivia continued, “There were private messages that were released without context to try to make a situation look like something that it wasn’t. Early on in the process of making the film, as the director, I tried to mediate a situation between people to try to see if they could work together happily.”

“Once it became clear that it was not a tenable working relationship, I was given an ultimatum. I chose my actress [Florence Pugh], which I’m very happy I did. At the time, was I bummed that we weren’t able to make it work? Sure. Did information about him come to light later that made me confident we made the right decision? Absolutely.”

Stephen then asked, “Did you fire Shia LaBeouf?”

“We had to replace Shia. He’s a fantastic actor but it wasn’t gonna work. When he gave me the ultimatum of, you know, him or Florence, I chose Florence.”

She added, “That was him feeling he was stepping away and me feeling like we were moving on without him.”

Stephen then clarified that, in this situation, both Shia can think he quit the film and Olivia can think he was fired from the film so that “both of you can think that you’re right.”

Olivia replied, “It’s a question of semantics.”

Stephen then doubled down and said, “Is that right?”

And Olivia responded, “Absolutely.”

So there you have it!

“It wasn’t going to move forward in the way he wanted it to and so he had to leave,” she finally said.

If you missed it, Olivia recently revealed if she left Jason Sudeikis to date Harry Styles.