Olivia Wilde is offering rare insight into how she coparents her two children with her ex-fiancé, Jason Sudeikis.
“I’m a very present mom even when I’m not able to be consistently present,” Wilde, 42, said on the Wednesday, June 17, episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. “I’m a coparent. I share custody, and I am really grateful for the opportunity to have this space when I am completely with my kids, completely engaged with them and they are the focus. … It’s an interesting thing, like, once you are sharing custody with someone. It shifts the way you think about parenting.”
Wilde and Sudeikis, 50, were together from 2011 to 2020, during which they welcomed son Otis, 12, and daughter Daisy, 9.
“I really value the opportunity to be completely present with them and then to hand them to a very capable coparent, very present with them when he’s with them,” Wilde stated, adding that she has her own space to “work [her] f***ing ass off” as an actress and director once they swap custody.
She continued, “In my life, I feel like I’m a superhero, not because of my skills, but because of the switching in between identities. My version of going into the phone booth and putting on the suit [like Superman’s Clark Kent] is going to work and being 100% hardcore available to work 24/7, but everyone in my life knows that when I’m with my kids, it’s the opposite.”
Even so, it can still be difficult for Wilde to strike a work-life balance.
“Sometimes that’s challenging. You have to find the balance,” the I Want Your Sex actress acknowledged. “I actually find divvying up responsibility in a way can allow for really amazing parenting because we are always [at] our best with our kids. They get the best of us.”
When it comes to her dynamic with Sudeikis, Wilde gushed that they are “great f***ing coparents.”
“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,” she stated. “We work really well as separated coparents. When I talk to people who are in very unhappy situations and staying in it for the kids, I’m like, ‘You’re doing no one any favors.’”
According to Wilde, it was not an “overnight process” to end her engagement with the Ted Lasso star.
“It’s very difficult and the idea that relationships can come to a place where you become strangers,” she told podcast host Alex Cooper. “It was March 2020, and Jason and I had been having a rough time for a while. Like, we had a real bumpy, bumpy ride. We were driving home from my birthday party my friends had had, and I said, ‘Did you give me a birthday present?’ And he said, ‘What would I get you, Olivia? I don’t know you.’ He wasn’t wrong. We didn’t know each other anymore.”
Wilde and Sudeikis quietly separated that fall, ultimately working out custody arrangements for Otis and Daisy.
