Olivia Wilde has revealed the fail-safe audition hack Sam Rockwell used earlier in his career.

Before she became an actress, The O.C. star worked as an assistant for casting director Mali Finn, and was often told about “the legend of the Sam Rockwell audition” for the 1999 movie The Green Mile.

Recalling the audition story she was told, Wilde revealed on Monday’s episode of SmartLess that Rockwell pretended he had been given the wrong scenes to learn and made the casting team believe he had impressively memorised the new lines in five minutes.

“He had been given the wrong scenes, 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,'” Wilde shared. “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.'”

“So they gave him the right scenes, he goes into the hallway, they only have five minutes to give him to learn the lines,” she continued. “He comes back in, and he nails it. And they were floored, and he got the role.”

The Invite director had the opportunity to talk to Rockwell about this story years later when they worked together on the 2011 movie Cowboys & Aliens.

“I was like, ‘Sam, it’s so nice to meet you, what an honour. I have to tell you I always heard this story when I was an assistant and it just really inspired me,'” she recalled. “And he goes, ‘Ha! Oh yeah, that was, like, a thing I used to do. That worked every time.’ I was like, ‘Are you f**king kidding me!?'”

Wilde noted that she spent years revering Rockwell’s “ability to flash memorise”, only to discover it was just a “brilliant” trick.

“He had the correct sides (script pages); it was a whole performance. And it’s so genius because it lowers their expectations,” she added. “Then if you even say half the things right, they’re like, ‘Goddam, this man learned this in five minutes.'”

The Oscar-winning actor played the antagonist William ‘Wild Bill’ Wharton alongside Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile.

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