HBO’s new series War pulled inspiration from multiple high-profile celebrity divorces, but the premiere took it one step further with a scene meant to mirror Olivia Wilde‘s infamous CinemaCon moment in which she was served custody paperwork on stage.
During the Thursday, October 1, premiere of War, fictional celebrity couple Morgan (Dominic West) and Carla (Sienna Miller) each planned to file for divorce. Morgan caught wind of Carla’s plans and was able to beat her to it by having an associate trick her into accepting the filing at her movie premiere.
“It’s not a direct copy. There’s definitely a nod. It’s a nod to that,” creator George Kay exclusively told Us. “But what I found really compelling about that actual real-life thing was how [Wilde] had to take on the brunt of the truth of what she’d just been served, and you really feel for her because she’s trying to do something else at the time.”
Kay was grateful for the emotion Miller, 44, brought to the fictional moment, adding, “This is such an important night for [Carla] when this happens, and she’s got to do her best acting of the year. Not in the film she’s promoting but in that moment.”
The screenwriter teased that this is just the beginning.
“Sienna plays an actress, so she can do that amazing thing as an actress herself of playing the actress, because in a show that’s about lawyers, it’s all about performance and not showing how you’re really feeling,” he continued. “We wanted to have a high-end world with kind of glamorous London, so we have a film actress star on one side of it and Dominic plays a social media billionaire who’s desperately trying to create a platform where we can be nice to each other, but that gets abused by everyone watching the divorce in the media.”
Kay continued: “His divorce is played out on his own social media platform. So it’s just a little comment on how social media can actually divide us rather than bring us together.”
In real life, Wilde, 42, was handed an envelope marked “personal and confidential” during a 2022 panel for her film Don’t Worry Darling at CinemaCon. Us later confirmed the envelope contained custody documents related to her and ex Jason Sudeikis’ kids: son Otis, 12, and daughter Daisy, 9.
“I will never forget one of the most f***ed-up things I went through, among so many, was that I was served papers on stage,” Wilde recalled during a June episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “Obviously, it was incredibly traumatizing. There’s so many elements to that.”
She continued: “I get through it because, weirdly, as women we’re taught to muscle through the most insane experiences. I was like, ‘Just finish your speech.’ [I] got through it, went backstage and completely dissolved into a puddle. But then, I thought no one saw it because there’s no phones allowed in this event.”
Wilde recalled being frustrated with the incident, which was caught on camera after all.
“I think that lawyers can be super f***ed up and do f***ed-up things. I’m aware of that, and all of that, but I think that people are never their best selves when they’re engaging in that kind of process,” she added. “It was so f***ed up in so many ways. I know that whether or not [Sudeikis] knew it was going to happen, I know it really hurt him to see it happening to me.”
War, meanwhile, follows two prestigious law firms in London — Cathcarts and Taylor & Byrne — as they face off in a scandalous divorce case between a tech entrepreneur and his film star wife.
“We have a brilliant lawyer consultant called Catherine who works with lots of high-powered divorce cases,” Kay told Us about the research that went on behind the scenes. “And at the beginning of the process, I was thinking we’re going to want to pilfer every celebrity divorce — like a dastardly maneuver and everything like that.”
The plan ultimately changed. “Then, having written the show, the more you want to do is just write the characters you’ve created,” he concluded. “So that kind of went out the window after a while, and we ended up having to think of our own dastardly things.”
War airs on HBO Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET and will be available to stream on HBO Max.
