Please call her by name.
Olivia Wilde set the record straight on how to pronounce her real last name, Cockburn.
“I’ll tell you something. And there’s no way you’ll know this. It’s pronounced KOH-burn,” the director told Dax Shepard and Monica Padman on the “Armchair Expert” podcast on Monday.
“It’s spelled Cockburn. It’s a Scottish name. It’s a lot like a boy’s name Sue… It’s kind of character-building,” the 42-year-old added.
“I think this is important. We should all give our kids shocking middle names so that they can grow up with something that would make them totally bullied.”
Wilde said she was teased because of her unusual last name, but believes it was an “important early lesson” in learning to laugh.
“I thought that was interesting too. I thought, ‘Oh, I see,'” she recalls.
The actress decided to change her last name to Wilde in high school in honor of legendary Irish writer and poet Oscar Wilde.
In a previous interview with Playboy, the “Don’t Worry Darling” star also said he wanted to pay homage to the writers in his family. “Many of them created pen names for their careers.”
“I have a grandfather who changed his name to James Helvick and wrote a novel, “To Kill the Devil,” which was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart,” she said.
“I always thought pen names were very romantic. I honestly didn’t expect people to see it as a ‘she’s amazing’ or a sexy name,” Wilde added.
“Whenever a story is written about me, the title is a play on my last name, like ‘Born to be Wild’ or ‘Take a Walk on the Wild Side.’ I don’t care. That was never something I thought about when I chose the name.”
Wilde’s mother, Leslie Cockburn, is an award-winning investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and author who served as a producer for “60 Minutes.”
As for her father, Andrew Cockburn, he is a British journalist, author, and magazine editor who has produced documentaries for PBS.
Wilde’s paternal grandfather and several of her uncles and aunts are also writers and journalists.
