“Don’t Worry Darling” actor KiKi Layne may have just piled on more controversy surrounding the movie. (See her post below.)
The up-and-coming star noted on Instagram Sunday that she was cut from most of the Olivia Wilde-directed film ― and that the best part about acting in it was the boon to her love life.
She apparently fell for co-star Ari’el Stachel, who she said also was largely excised from the movie.
“The best thing about #DontWorryDarling is that I was lucky enough to meet @arielstachel,” she wrote with video showing the happy couple. “They cut us from most of the movie, but we thriving in real life.”
Layne starred in the 2018 movie “If Beale Street Could Talk” that yielded star Regina King an Oscar. She also appeared in the sequel “Coming 2 America” (2021) and provided one of the marquee voices to this year’s “Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers.”
But her role as Margaret in the “Stepford Wives”-like “Don’t Worry Darling” got short shrift, according to HuffPost reviewer Candice Frederick.
The movie “presents a character with a ton of potential to really subvert past iterations of this premise, and does very little with her,” Frederick wrote. “Margaret has maybe a handful of lines in the whole movie, yet she is crucial to the story.”
The $35 million-budgeted movie opened to a relatively solid $19.2 million gross over the weekend amid reports of Wilde feuding with star Florence Pugh and speculation over whether “Darling” lead Harry Styles spit on co-star Chris Pine at the Venice Film Festival screening. That was in addition to insistence from Shia LaBeouf that he quit the film before Styles took his role — not that he was fired, as Wilde claimed.
Stachel, mostly a stage and TV actor who had a recurring role on “Law and Order: SVU,” played off Layne’s post by saying she was his “favorite part of my experience in Don’t Worry Darling.”
“This woman did phenomenal work and I was thirsty the second I met her,” he wrote.
