Jason Sudeikis Opens Up About Olivia Wilde Split in Rare Comments: ‘Don’t Wish It on Anyone’

Jason Sudeikis and Olivia Wilde‘s 2020 split infamously turned ugly amid their custody battle. Six years later, the Horrible Bosses star claimed he could have handled things differently.

“I could have communicated better within, you know, how I felt. How things were making me feel. How things, you know, make me feel,” Sudeikis, 51, said during an appearance on the Saturday, October 17, episode of the Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso podcast. “If I’m feeling a certain way and I don’t talk about it, that doesn’t make it go away.”

The couple were in a relationship for nearly a decade before calling off their engagement in 2020. Wilde, 42, moved on with Harry Styles. The pair dated for nearly two years before splitting in November 2022.

According to the Saturday Night Live alum, it was “unfair” for him to expect “someone to be a mindreader” in their relationship.

While on stage at CinemaCon in April 2022, The OC alum — who shares son Otis, 12, and daughter Daisy, 10, with her ex-fiancé — was served custody papers from Sudeikis. In a statement later shared to the Los Angeles Times, he said he did not know that would happen and “would never condone her being served in such an inappropriate manner.”

“What’s interesting is that it allows you capacity for empathy for when others go through those [things in public],” Sudeikis said during his Talk Easy podcast appearance, noting how uncomfortable it was for him that fans seemed to have found “joy” in learning about his personal trauma.

“I don’t wish it on anyone because I don’t think it really moves the needle,” he added. “To be clear, this isn’t like, ‘all evil is just misunderstood’ or something like that. I just mean these interpersonal situations that then get portrayed as being these, you know, binary situations of right and wrong, left and right, whatever.”

He added, “It’s always more complicated, more human than that.”

As Star previously reported, Wilde revealed her version of how the relationship ended during a June appearance on Call Her Daddy.

In 2020, while discussing her upcoming birthday, she asked Sudeikis if he’d gotten her a gift.

“He said, ‘What would I get you, Olivia? I don’t know you,'” Wilde recalled. “And he wasn’t wrong. We didn’t know each other anymore. That was when we realized it was over.”