Olivia Wilde, now 42, was barely in her early 20s when her publicist called her with news that should have sounded like a dream come true: she had just been named number one on Maxim’s Hot 100 list in 2009, the year of the ranking’s tenth anniversary.
But on the Call Her Daddy podcast with Alex Cooper, the actress said she did not feel that way. She said it was “the most fucked-up thing in the world”, because in high school she had never felt she fit beauty standards, and suddenly her name was at the top of a list that measured exactly that.
Wilde acknowledged that the title also opened doors for her in her casting career. But she is still uncomfortable with the fact that her value was tied, even if only for a moment, to “a subjective and arbitrary definition of beauty” 🎬