Is Harry Styles’ One Direction Song ‘Olivia’ About Olivia Wilde?
In early January 2021, social media lit up with rumors that Harry Styles, the former One Direction lead singer, and Olivia Wilde, the famed actor and director of Booksmart, were dating. The rumors started swirling after the two were spotted holding hands while attending a wedding.
While neither Wilde nor Styles have spoken publicly about their budding love affair, the rumor mill is going crazy, with some fans suggesting that Styles himself predicted the romance in a 2015 One Direction song.
Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles are rumored to be dating
Styles first rose to fame in 2011, with the growing popularity of his band, One Direction. Along with his fellow bandmates, Styles released such popular tunes as “What Makes You Beautiful,” “Story of My Life,” and “Best Song Ever.”
In 2015, the band dispersed, at the height of their popularity. All the group members have gone on to pursue their own interests, but Styles has remained the most high-profile of all the former One Direction band members.
He has been linked to many celebrities, including Kendall Jenner and Taylor Swift. But Styles has always remained vague on both his sexuality and his romantic attachments.
Wilde, however, was most recently in a long-term relationship with comedian Jason Sudeikis. They started dating in 2011 and got engaged in 2013, going on to welcome two children together.
They never got married, but many fans believed that they would be together forever. Still, in November 2020, Wilde and Sudeikis revealed that they had broken up some months prior, and were focused on amicably co-parenting their children.
When did Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles start dating?
While few fans would likely have put Wilde and Styles together, it seems as though the two have been able to forge a serious bond.
In early January, Wilde and Styles were spotted holding hands at the wedding of Styles’ manager, seemingly getting very cozy. In the days since the two were seen holding hands, multiple sources have confirmed that the two stars are dating, and have been seeing each other for at least a few weeks.
“What started out as a close friendship, quickly turned romantic,” a source told PEOPLE. “Everyone saw it coming. During breaks, he’s hasn’t been able to stay away and visited her trailer.”
Considering how private Styles likes to keep his personal life, it seems unlikely that he will be chatting about his relationship with Wilde anytime soon. Still, some perceptive fans have looked to past songs that Styles has released as proof of some cosmic connection that the singer and the actress could share.
Was the One Direction song ‘Olivia’ about Olivia Wilde?
In 2015, One Direction released a song called “Olivia.” The tune was one of the last songs that the boy band collaborated on before their split, and it never became a major hit. Still, there’s some serious significance there, for those who choose to dig deep.
The song, a soulful love track — written by Harry Styles, John Ryan, and Julian Bunetta — features Styles crooning the words: “I live for you, I long for you, Olivia / I’ve been idolizing the light in your eyes, Olivia / I live for you, I long for you, Olivia / Don’t let me go, don’t let me go.”
Later in the track, Styles sings: “When you go and I’m alone / You live in my imagination / The summertime and butterflies / All belong to your creation / I love you, it’s all I do, I love you.”
While the song was co-written, the credit largely goes to Styles. Bunetta, a co-writer of Olivia, told Rolling Stone: “This one is very near and dear to my heart. Harry, John [Ryan, co-writer], and I were in Westlake and trying to write one thing and came out with this. I don’t know how it came out. We couldn’t write anything for a couple days, and we couldn’t focus. We were trying to write things, and they were bad. Then we would just laugh and order food and hang out. Then all of a sudden, at the very end of the day when Harry was going to leave, he was sort of saying the chorus phrase, so we just sat there and wrote it really quick. It came out really, really quick… That was an incredibly adult, musically indulgent song that we all had a lot of fun making. It makes me so happy. But “Olivia” was Harry’s genius.”
That said, given the timeline of the song and their new romance, it seems likely that the song is just a crazy coincidence. Bustle once speculated Olivia is about singer Taylor Swift.
It is hard to tell if this new relationship will last, but it is clear that Wilde and Styles will have fans hanging on to their every move in the coming days.
