Key Points
On Wednesday’s episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast,Olivia Wilde recalled the important advice Pamela Anderson once gave her.
The director and actress said she reached out to Anderson after seeing the 2023 documentary about the Hollywood icon.
“She wrote to me and she said, ‘The most rebellious thing you can do is stay soft. Don’t let it harden you,'” Wilde said.
Olivia Wilde is sharing the sweet advice that Hollywood icon Pamela Anderson once gave her.
During a recent conversation on the Call Her Daddypodcast, the Booksmart director revealed that she privately reached out to Anderson following the release of her 2023 documentary, Pamela, A Love Story.
“The thing that I’ve learned, and I actually learned this from… This sounds so crazy,” Wilde began. “But after I saw the documentary about Pamela Anderson, I reached out to her, and I was like, ‘Yo, respect. Just want to say big fan, respect.'”
Olivia Wilde at the 2025 Academy Museum Gala; Pamela Anderson at the London premiere of ‘The Naked Gun’ in 2025
Credit: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic; Karwai Tang/WireImage
Wilde explained that Anderson was “aware of some of the s— that I was going through” at the time and responded to her.
“She wrote to me and she said, ‘The most rebellious thing you can do is stay soft. Don’t let it harden you,'” Wilde recalled.
Pamela, A Love Story premiered on Netflix in January 2023, just four months after Wilde released her film Don’t Worry Darling. Earlier in the podcast, the director opened up about experiencing intense public scrutiny surrounding both her personal and professional life while promoting the psychological thriller.
“It was so hard, because I wanted to be like, ‘Can I just talk to people? Can I just go and say, like, That’s not true! That’s not true!'” Wilde said. “And it was like, ‘No, that won’t help.’ And that was really hard.”
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At the same time, she was also trying to promote a movie on behalf of its cast and crew.
“I was like, ‘It’s not about me. It’s about this movie that everyone works so hard to make,'” Wilde said. “And I felt like I was working on behalf of hundreds of people who had worked through COVID to make something really difficult.”
That didn’t make the wave of backlash any easier to handle, though. “I felt frustrated that I couldn’t defend myself, but it also felt like, ‘Okay, it’s not about you. Just get the movie out,'” she said. “And the pummeling that I took was so insanely disproportionate.”
Still, she understood that people were “looking for evidence to reinforce the narrative” that they’d created about her and that any attempts to set the record straight would’ve only further reinforced their beliefs.
“I don’t blame people, because I understand,” Wilde said, noting that it was as if their anger wasn’t directed toward her but rather “people just removed the human” from the situation.
Looking back at the drama now, Wilde admitted that she also “didn’t understand the value of vulnerability” at the time.
“I thought that, put a f—ing smile on and get out there and put on a beautiful dress and, like, be Teflon, and that was the way to get through it,” she remarked. “I actually think there’s value in being vulnerable and just being like, ‘Oh, ouch. I don’t know, this hurts!'”
She added that her own attempts to be strong and rise above the criticisms may have come off “as inauthentic,” adding, “People are like, ‘You must be hurting. Why are you pretending to not be hurting? … I sense that you’re not showing us your pain, and therefore, I’m gonna cause you more pain.'”
Watch Wilde discuss the drama surrounding Don’t Worry Darling and Anderson’s note in the clip above.
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