Gossip history: Billy Crudup and Naomi Watts, Mary-Louise Parker, and Claire Danes
It's Gossip Time!
Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: two actors get late-in-life married, another actor gets into a “situationship,” and Katy Perry gets bangs (uh oh).
Naomi Watts and Billy Crudup got married last week! The actors, both 54, have been dating since 2017 and reportedly got engaged a few months ago. Watts officially announced the marriage on Instagram, sharing photos from their wedding at City Hall in Manhattan.
Several other celebrities congratulated the happy couple, including Reese Witherspoon, Amy Sedaris, Gwyneth Paltrow, Justin Theroux, and Watts’s ex-partner and the father of her two children, Liev Schrieber. “Congratulations!!! Gorgeous!!!” he wrote. Aw.
Schrieber, 55, is currently dating a 31-year-old former pageant queen named Taylor Nielsen. She’s pregnant. Good news all around.
Crudup’s romantic history is a bit more complicated, and it was unearthed again this week after a Guardian reporter asked his ex-girlfriend Mary-Louise Parker what she thought about the marriage. The interviewer, Lauren Mechling, writes that Parker seemed “stunned” by the wedding news but quickly collected herself. “I wish them well,” she said. “And absolutely, I honestly of course wish them every happiness because that’s my son’s father. So I’m happy for them.”
“I’m happy they found each other,” she added, before her publicist cut her off and ended the interview.
If you weren’t paying attention to celebrity gossip in the early 2000s, here’s why the topic is touchy: Crudup dumped Parker when she was seven months pregnant with their son in 2003. At the time, the tabloids reported that Crudup left her for Claire Danes. Crudup and Danes denied the story initially, claiming that Danes was still with her musician boyfriend Ben Lee (who remembers that guy?). “Claire has been friends with Billy for 10 years,” her rep told People. She was 24 at the time.
Parker gave birth in January 2004 to a baby named William, after Crudup. A few months later, Crudup and Danes started showing up in public together, and they went on to date until 2006, when Danes left Crudup for her current husband Hugh Dancy. In an interview with Howard Stern in 2015, Danes described the Crudup situation thusly: “I was just in love with him and needed to explore that, and I was 24.” The backlash, she said, “was a scary thing. That was really hard. I didn’t know how to not do that. It’s OK. I went through it. We’re friendly — we’re friends.”
Parker never directly commented on the split but referenced it obliquely in her 2015 memoir-in-letters Dear Mr. You. And Crudup hasn’t talked about it at all, except to ask a New York Times reporter not to mention it in a profile in 2004. “I just want to make an argument for not including anything about the Mary-Louise Parker situation,” he wrote to the reporter, Jesse Green, in an email. “First and foremost it is personal, painful and involves an infant, and does not deserve to be exploited to sate the appetites of circulation counters and bored readers. I have never indulged our society's misguided notion that my personal life is relevant to my work, so any reporting surrounding that is necessarily hearsay, speculation or fantasy. Each published report is based only on the trade of suffering.”
It does seem like everything is basically fine now, so perhaps it was the right move for Crudup and Parker to stay quiet about the breakup at the time. Hopefully at least Watts has some idea of what happened.
In more happy-couple news, Channing Tatum and Zoë Kravitz are still together after two years of dating, even though they aren’t photographed so much anymore. (They were last papped walking into Taylor Swift’s apartment in New York about a month ago.) According to Us Weekly, they are happy together but not planning to get married. “They’ve both been there, done that, and it didn’t work out, so there are no plans for an engagement,” a source told the tabloid. They added, however, that the couple is open to having a baby together. Sure, why not?
Also taking things slow: Leonardo DiCaprio and Gigi Hadid. Yes, the tabloids still want everyone to think this relationship is happening, even though DiCaprio, 48, and Hadid, 27, are almost never seen together and DiCaprio is spending his summer yachting around Europe with other (younger) models.
“Leo and Gigi have a friendly, no-strings ‘situationship’ right now,” an insider told Us Weekly this week. “They travel so often so it’s best for them to keep their relationship open and fluid.”
Perhaps it is so open as to be nonexistent? I don’t know, I have a hard time imagining DiCaprio even saying the word “situationship.”
While they haven’t been photographed together since Memorial Day, it seems like Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet are still romantically involved. Jenner has been sporting a new, softer look on Instagram lately that her fans have attributed to the relationship. Fans also think she has a hickey in the fifth photo of this carousel:
Good for everyone.
STUFF BY HILARY DUFF: Hilary Duff is on the cover of Shape this week! She wants to know if she’s giving Cadet Kelly vibes in one of the photos. Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Finally, I’ll leave you with the news that Katy Perry got bangs:
This can’t be good.
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Re: Katy Perry, getting bangs is one thing, getting the Courteney Cox in Scream 3 bangs is a whole different thing. Could not be a louder cry for help.
“‘Claire and Billy have been friends for 10 years.’ Danes was 24 at the time.” Lol! Nothing legitimizes a situation like saying a middle aged man has been friends with a girl since she was 14 😆 Perfect slide in of shade there.