Olivia Wilde has responded to one of the week's uglier celebrity pile-ons with the only thing that made sense: humour.
After adistorted red carpet clip from SFGatetriggered a flood of online comments comparing her to Gollum from 'The Lord of the Rings', the actress and director declined to perform outrage and instead dismantled the image itself.
'She looks as if she had found the one ring,' online users say.
That matters because the viral conversation was never really about one awkward camera angle. It was another familiar public autopsy of a woman's face, accelerated by social media and dressed up as concern, comedy or both.
The footage in question came from Olivia Wilde's appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival on 24 April, where she was promoting her latest film, 'The Invite'. In the close-up interview,posted by SFGate,Wilde appeared unusually gaunt and wide-eyed, enough for clips and screenshots to spread rapidly across X, TikTok and Instagram.
Comment sections did what comment sections now do with depressing efficiency. Some users claimed she looked unrecognisable. Others compared her to a 'resurrected corpse'. The Gollum memes followed quickly.
Wilde, 42, addressed it on Instagram Stories on 2 May, posting a side-by-side image of herself and the Tolkien creature while laughing through amock interrogation filmed by her younger brother, Charlie Cockburn.
'Listen, that is a fisheye lens,' she said. 'And I admit, is that my best angle? Was that my best ever look? No.'
'It's a startling image. It's a fisheye lens. I don't know why I was so close to the camera, I didn't need to have to be.'
Then, after the joke had fully landed, Wilde added, 'Do you have any more questions? I'm not dead.'
Source: International Business Times UK
