We’ve got the details about the drama — and the recipe.
While we agree that picking the right dressing is a paramount piece of building the perfect salad, we never expected to pay this much attention to the stuff that gets drizzled on our greens. And yet here we are, tracking down the formula for Olivia Wilde’s favorite salad dressing, which is causing quite the buzz online.
The actress and director has been all over the headlines lately, largely due to the over-the-top drama surrounding the production of her latest movie, Don’t Worry Darling. This salad dressing hubbub is partly related to that story, but it also goes much further back.
A relationship refresher
Let’s start at the beginning: Wilde first began dating fellow actor (and future Ted Lasso star) Jason Sudeikis back in 2011. They got engaged in 2013, then had their son, Otis, in 2014, and their daughter, Daisy, in 2016.
The bliss was over by November 2020, when PEOPLE reported that the couple had called off their engagement. Just a few months later, in January 2021, Wilde was photographed holding hands with Harry Styles, the pop megastar who was also acting under Wilde’s direction in Don’t Worry Darling. Sudeikis was allegedly “absolutely heartbroken” about the split, but we didn’t (yet) have any indication that their interactions were so dramatic behind the scenes.
That changed in April of this year, when this became very public. Wilde was appearing at a CinemaCon event when a mysterious person approached the stage and handed her an envelope. She opened it, saw what was inside, and quickly moved on — but we soon learned that it contained legal documents from Sudeikis regarding the custody of their children. You can watch the moment that Wilde realized that right here:
Wilde has since described being publicly served as a “vicious” maneuver, and ever since it happened, speculation has run rampant about what actually led to the dissolution of their relationship and when it happened.
That brings us — almost — to the salad dressing. And let us say this: While a lot of this story has been covered as celebrity frivolity (and much of it is), some of these details are actually quite sad, at least when it comes to Wilde and Sudeikis’s children, who are dealing with a fissure in their family that’s playing out in a painfully public way. An explosive Daily Mail report published this week included intel from the couple’s former nanny, who shared extensive detail (and text messages) about the conflicts unfolding in their home as their split happened and Styles came into the picture.
While Wilde’s narrative has always been that she and Sudeikis were totally separated by the time she began seeing Styles, the nanny tells a different story. According to the children’s caregiver (whose name isn’t cited by the Daily Mail), Wilde had left their home after starting production on Don’t Worry Darling for what was supposed to be a temporary break from the relationship, but it soon became dramatically permanent.
“On the Monday morning, Nov. 9, when I came back from a weekend off, [Sudeikis] was crying a lot, crying and crying. I didn’t know what had happened at all,” the nanny said. “After I’d got the kids ready, Jason came upstairs and was having some coffee. He was crying and a mess, saying, ‘She left us. She left us!'”
The nanny’s recounting of events also indicates that Sudeikis directly contradicted Wilde’s claim that they were already broken up before she began her relationship with Styles.
“He started telling me details [of Wilde’s relationship with Styles],” the nanny explained, “and he said, ‘She put the move on him. She put the first move on him. She kissed him at one of the dinners they had for the cast in Palm Springs. She did that.'”
The story with Olivia Wilde’s “special” salad dressing
OK, now we’ve made it to the salad dressing. A few days after this exchange, an angry Sudeikis told the nanny that he was furious because Wilde had made a salad with “her special dressing,” and she was taking it to eat with Styles.
“I said, ‘What salad dressing?'” the nanny recalled. “He said, ‘She has a special salad dressing she makes for us, and she’s taken it to have it with [Styles] now. I don’t know what was in it.’ Out of everything, he was like, ‘She made her special salad dressing and took it to him.'”
The nanny also describes Sudeikis’s attempts to stop Wilde from leaving for that meal with Styles, which included following Wilde outside and laying on the ground next to her car so she couldn’t leave.
This information has been devoured across the Internet, but Wilde and Sudeikis dispute its veracity. The couple released this joint statement to multiple media outlets: “As parents, it is incredibly upsetting to learn that a former nanny of our two young children would choose to make such false and scurrilous accusations about us publicly. Her now 18-month-long campaign of harassing us, as well as loved ones, close friends, and colleagues, has reached its unfortunate apex. We will continue to focus on raising and protecting our children with the sincere hope that she will now choose to leave our family alone.”
OK, so what’s in Olivia Wilde’s special salad dressing?
There’s plenty to unpack here, but one question everyone is fixating on is this: What is in that salad dressing?
Last night, Wilde posted the recipe on her Instagram account (!), finally addressing all the internet speculation. It’s actually a recipe taken straight from Nora Ephron’s stellar autobiographical novel Heartburn, and here, after much fanfare, it is:
Blend 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard with 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar. Then, “whisking constantly with a fork,” slowly add 6 tablespoons of olive oil until the vinaigrette is thick and creamy.
This vinaigrette is obviously one of the least important details in this family saga, but perhaps it’s become a flash point because it’s one of the lighter components of what is otherwise a pretty difficult story. In any event, now you can make it for yourself and decide if it’s worth all the attention it’s been slathered with.
