When Olivia Wilde was handed a mysterious envelope on stage midway through her presentation before a packed Las Vegas audience, many assumed it was the set-up for an elaborate joke.
Instead, she was getting served legal papers from her ex-partner Jason Sudeikis.
"This is for me, right?" asked Wilde, interrupted while introducing footage from her coming thriller Don't Worry Darling during Warner Bros' presentation at CinemaCon, the annual movie industry gathering.
"Very mysterious. I'm going to open it now," she said, opening an envelope marked "Personal and Confidential" after it was slid calmly on to the stage by an unknown person.
Glancing at its contents, she asked, "Is this a script? OK, got it. Thank you," before returning to her description of her thriller, hardly missing a beat.
The envelope was never referred to again during the presentation, prompting speculation that somebody had tried to slip a new screenplay to the actor-director.
But it emerged on Wednesday that the document held legal papers concerning the two children Wilde has with her former partner Sudeikis, star of television comedy Ted Lasso.
"Papers were drawn up to establish jurisdiction relating to the children of Ms Wilde and Mr Sudeikis," a source close to Sudeikis told AFP.
"Mr Sudeikis had no prior knowledge of the time or place that the envelope would have been delivered as this would solely be up to the process service company involved and he would never condone her being served in such an inappropriate manner."
Wilde's representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Don't Worry Darling, a twisty thriller inspired by The Truman Show and Inception, stars Harry Styles, who is currently dating Wilde.
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Pharaoh's curse
British aristocrat Lord Carnarvon, who funded the expedition to find the Tutankhamun tomb, died in a Cairo hotel four months after the crypt was opened.
He had been in poor health for many years after a car crash, and a mosquito bite made worse by a shaving cut led to blood poisoning and pneumonia.
Reports at the time said Lord Carnarvon suffered from “pain as the inflammation affected the nasal passages and eyes”.
Decades later, scientists contended he had died of aspergillosis after inhaling spores of the fungus aspergillus in the tomb, which can lie dormant for months. The fact several others who entered were also found dead withiin a short time led to the myth of the curse.
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PROFILE OF HALAN
Started: November 2017
Founders: Mounir Nakhla, Ahmed Mohsen and Mohamed Aboulnaga
Based: Cairo, Egypt
Sector: transport and logistics
Size: 150 employees
Investment: approximately $8 million
Investors include: Singapore’s Battery Road Digital Holdings, Egypt’s Algebra Ventures, Uber co-founder and former CTO Oscar Salazar