“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.”
The hashtags were difficult to ignore as well:
#GotMyCheck #GotMyMan #EverythingHappensforaReason.
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.