Olivia Wilde says shared custody has changed the way she thinks about motherhood.
The actress and director opened up about parenting her two children with ex-fiancé Jason Sudeikis during the June 17 episode of Call Her Daddy. Wilde and Sudeikis share son Otis, 12, and daughter Daisy, 9, and split in 2020 after nearly a decade together.
In the interview, Wilde said the arrangement has allowed both parents to be more focused when they are with their children. People reported that she described Sudeikis as a “very capable co-parent” and said she values the time when the kids are fully her focus.
Wilde Says Shared Custody Made Her More Present
“I’m a very present mom even when I’m not able to be consistently present,” Wilde said on the podcast. She explained that sharing custody has given her clearer blocks of time: when she is with Otis and Daisy, she is completely with them, and when they are with their dad, she can focus on work without pretending she is available for everything at once.
“It’s an interesting thing, like, once you are sharing custody with someone. It shifts the way you think about parenting,” Wilde said, according to Us Weekly. She compared the switch between work and parenting to changing identities, saying that when she is with her kids, her life moves in the opposite direction from her all-hours work mode.
She Says the Kids Get Better Versions of Both Parents
Wilde told Alex Cooper that the split schedule has helped create “really amazing parenting” because both parents can show up with more energy during their own time with the children. “I actually find this divvying up of responsibility in a way can allow for really amazing parenting because we are always our best with our kids,” she said. “They get the best of us.”
She also described her current dynamic with Sudeikis in unusually direct terms. “We are great f—ing co-parents,” Wilde said, adding that their children are getting a better version of both parents now than they did when the relationship itself was no longer working.
“These kids are consistently getting the best of us in a way that when we were together was not possible because we did not work together, but we work really well as separated co-parents,” she said.
Wilde Pushed Back on Staying Together Just for the Kids
Wilde said the co-parenting arrangement has shaped how she talks to people who are unhappy but staying in a relationship because children are involved. “When I talk to people who are just in very unhappy situations and staying in it for the kids, I’m like, ‘You’re doing no one any favors,’” she said.
Her comments come after years of public attention around the split, including the 2022 CinemaCon moment when Wilde was served custody papers onstage while promoting Don’t Worry Darling. She revisited that episode elsewhere in the same podcast appearance, calling it traumatizing, but her co-parenting comments focused on where things stand now rather than relitigating the dispute.
She Also Addressed the Double Standard Around Dating as a Mom
Wilde also talked about the reaction to her dating life after the split. People reported that she said it hurt when people suggested she had “forgotten” she was a mother while dating Harry Styles.
She contrasted that with the way Sudeikis was discussed when he was photographed with his then-girlfriend during a holiday period. Wilde said she was with the kids at the time because it was her time with them, but felt the public would have judged her much more harshly if the situation had been reversed.
“And then I would, on my weeks when I wasn’t [with the kids], and I would be somewhere, people would be like, ‘Well, my, my, my. Oh, she forgot her kids. I guess she forgot she’s a mom.’ It was nuts,” Wilde said.