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Nine episodes into the show's fourth season, Olivia Wilde has a regular role on FOX's House. She has secrets and storylines and romantic possibilities. One thing she doesn't have is a name. "You know it's funny," Wilde tells reporters on a recent conference call. "I thought they were going to reveal it awhile ago, and I think it's great that the producers made this dramatic choice not to reveal it when they had planned to. And they actually tried to hide it, it disappeared from the call sheets. It disappeared from around the set. I think they're not putting too much value on the secrecy of a name, but they like the fact that it is established this sort of inside joke between House and Thirteen. He could easily look at her file and see her name, but he chooses to keep it up." Wilde says she knows her characters name and, "I love it." Show-off. It's nice that producers told Wilde Thirteen's real name, because for several months, she was just one of a dozen actors working on a per-episode basis wondering which doctors would get added to House's team and therefore which actors would get to stick around one of TV's highest rated shows. "It meant that we never took it for granted, which was great," Wilde says. "We never knew if our characters were a short-term arc or if we would be there for awhile. And so it sort of made it more of mystery and kind of kept us on our toes, which I think is a really good thing. And I think it's why the performances turned out as well as we all feel they did is because there was no chance to get lazy, no time for laziness. It was all finding out each week, whether we’d be there the next week. And it was pretty exciting and pretty stressful and what it did was just make us really enjoy every minute of it." Every minute of it? Surely turning a slew of recognizable young actors into contract players must have created a little on-set competition? "[W]e decided very early on that the only way to deal with the competitiveness that was obviously in the air was to joke about it constantly," the veteran of The O.C. and Skin says. "The great thing is that everyone had a very kind of relaxed and secure personality, and so there wasn't any cattiness. I'm being completely honest when I say that. We were shocked ourselves. We were sure that there would be some sort of disappointment and kind of jealousy, but there wasn't because everyone just had a great sense of humor about it. And we all understood that being on one episode of House is a huge break for any actor. So once we had done one, it was like, no one can complain, really. This is all good for all of us and we trusted the creative producers of the show to pick the people that worked best for the show." After an extended break that allowed FOX to space out its last remaining pre-strike episodes, House returns on Tuesday (Jan. 29) night with an oddly timed Christmas episode, followed by the show's post-Super Bowl episode on Sunday.
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