The two worked together on 2011’s “Cowboys & Aliens.”

Olivia Wilde shares Sam Rockwell’s ingenious trick for nailing auditions

The two worked together on 2011’s “Cowboys & Aliens.”

By Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt is a writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2024. Her work has previously appeared on Yahoo and in American *Journalism Review* and *The Shreveport Times*.

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July 14, 2026 7:51 p.m. ET

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Olivia Wilde and Sam Rockwell in 2019. Credit:

Lawrence Busacca/Getty

- Sam Rockwell’s *Cowboys & Aliens* costar Olivia Wilde said she worked for a casting director as a teen and heard impressive stories about Rockewell’s auditions.

- When Wilde and Rockwell eventually worked together, he revealed his secret to acing auditions.

- Rockwell would pretend he hadn’t received the correct lines for his character and was learning them on the spot.

That Sam Rockwell is a sly one.

Just ask Olivia Wilde, who worked with the actor on the 2011 sci-fi Western *Cowboys & Aliens* and was shocked to learn his brilliant trick for nailing auditions before he became a big star.

During a recent appearance on the *SmartLess* podcast, Wilde recalled how it all went down. She was more than familiar with Rockwell’s work, in part because she had worked as an assistant to the late casting director Mali Finn as a teenager.

“While I was working there, there was the legend of the Sam Rockwell audition,” Wilde explained. “She would tell us, ‘The best audition I’ve ever seen was Sam Rockwell auditioning for *The Green Mile*.”

Sam Rockwell in ‘The Green Mile’.

Warner Brothers/ Everett

Rockwell portrayed sadistic death row inmate “Wild Bill” Wharton in the 1994 drama, opposite Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan.

“He came in, and it was the last day of the director’s sessions, the last possible day you could audition, and he had been given the wrong scenes,” Wilde recounted. “And this man, Sam Rockwell, he didn’t even pause, he said, ‘Well, give me the correct scenes and I’ll go learn them really quickly.’ And they said, ‘That’s impossible, Sam. It’s 10 pages of dialogue, you can’t possibly, no one could do it.’ And he was like, ‘Just give me a chance, I don’t want to miss this opportunity.’”

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So they gave him the correct lines — supposedly for the first time — and five minutes. “He comes back in, and he nails it,” Wilde said. “And they were floored, and he got the role.”

But Wilde learned the truth years later.

“I’m working with Sam and I’m sitting next to him in the makeup chair and I was like, ‘Sam, it’s so nice to meet you, what an honor. I have to tell you I always heard this story when I was an assistant and it just really inspired me,’” Wilde remembered telling him. “And he goes, ‘Ha! Oh yeah, that was, like, a thing I used to do. That worked every time.’”

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Wilde was stunned. “I was like, ‘Are you f‑‑‑ing kidding me!?’ I revered his ability to flash-memorize,” the actress said. “He knew — he had the correct sides, it was a whole performance. And it’s so genius because it lowers their expectations. Then if you even say half the things right they’re like, ‘Goddam, this man learned this in five minutes. He deserves an Oscar.”

** has reached out to a representative for Rockwell for comment.

But the actor doesn’t need any tricks to land a role these days. Rockwell has worked steadily in movies such as 2017’s* Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri*, for which he won an Oscar, and 2002’s *Confessions of a Dangerous Mind*.

Watch Wilde’s full *SmartLess* appearance above.

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