Olivia Wilde is 'House'-mate that's here to stay

Auditions are seldom a favorite part of any actor's job, but Olivia Wilde says she enjoyed the whole process of becoming a new regular on House, the hit Fox medical drama returning with new episodes, starting tonight in the US.

It could have been a real ordeal. As "Thirteen," the nickname by which her character is known on the show, Wilde and several other actors played young doctors battling for a limited number of spots on the medical team of Dr. Greg House ( Hugh Laurie). And, in a case of life imitating art, Wilde and the other newbies weren't sure which of them would be selected to become new regulars.

"We all had different deals, so we knew we had a certain number of episodes, but we didn't know beyond that point who would stay and who would go," says Wilde, 24. "Once it got to that point where we were having to wait until the next script to see who would disappear, it became an interesting environment. What was so great about our group is that no one approached it in a negative way. The only way to deal with that kind of tension in the air was to joke about it constantly.

"It was great, because none of us was taking any moment for granted. That happens a lot in television, where you forget that you are incredibly lucky to have a role and you should continually be working to develop it. We felt that we were constantly having to prove ourselves, which means that we were all probably working harder than we would have been otherwise."

Mastering her character's technical jargon and adjusting to a fast-paced series where the focus is on the puzzling case of the week were challenges, Wilde says, but she looks to series star Laurie as an example of how to keep her priorities straight.

"It's extraordinary to watch an actor who takes so many risks," she says. "Hugh never settles, and he's continually harder on himself than anyone else. When you're on a show that shoots nine months out of the year, it makes some people lazy. Watching him every day is sort of like a master class in acting, especially since he carries it off with such humour and grace."

If her "House" work is rewarding, her first network series role, in the short-lived 2003-04 Fox drama "Skin," was valuable mainly as a learning experience. As the ingénue lead in this "Romeo and Juliet" story set against the backdrop of the porn industry, Wilde was touted by Fox flacks as the Next Big Thing, but all the attention went away once the show tanked.

"One day all these people were bowing down to me and throwing free clothes at me and telling me I was the best thing since sliced bread, and the next day the show was cancelled and all of that disappeared," Wilde recalls. "That was great for an 18-year-old to learn and I will never again take the bull seriously."

The daughter of writers and documentary filmmakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, Wilde was born in New York but grew up mainly in the Washington, D.C., area, graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. She says she has known since she was 5 years old that she wanted to be an actress.

"It was either that or the nuthouse," Wilde says, laughing. "I remember seeing my first episode of 'Saturday Night Live' and asking my mother what those people were doing, and she said, 'They're actors.' I said, 'They get paid to do that? Sign me up!' I started seeing a lot of theatre and becoming engrossed in it, and I was just so excited that there was a profession that involved all of those things."

After high school, which included a period of study at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, Ireland, Wilde took off a year before planning to start college and travelled to Los Angeles, where she quickly began to find work. After Skin, she had a better experience on The O.C., where she played Alex Kelly, a bisexual beauty who dated both Seth Cohen ( Adam Brody) and Marissa Cooper ( Mischa Barton). She had a great time on the show, she says, although she hadn't realized she was joining a pop-culture phenomenon.