IT'S GOSSIP TIME
Welcome to the first edition.
Hello and welcome to the first edition of Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: a celebrity couple disagrees about celebrity voting PSAs, a 70-year-old star prepares to welcome his sixth child, and Mary-Kate Olsen smokes a cigarette.
What should celebrities do to make themselves useful in the month leading up to a presidential election? Looking at Instagram, it’s clear that a majority of them have decided that the correct answer to that question is “encourage people to vote.” Some have taken it a step further by explicitly stating that they are voting for Joe Biden and/or speaking out against the current president. (Even Taylor Swift, who notably sat out the 2016 campaign, endorsed Biden in a V magazine feature this week, alongside other stars including Mariah Carey, Janelle Monae, and Jennifer Lawrence.) But at least one A-list actor seems determined to remain politically neutral this time around, as if such a thing could really be accomplished.
I’m referring, of course, to Chris Pratt, known to me and perhaps to you, too, as the famous Chris most likely to be a Republican. Last week, while his peers made voting PSAs to their millions of Instagram followers, Pratt mocked their efforts in a backhanded attempt to promote his latest animated movie’s chances at the — wait for it — People’s Choice Awards. Funny joke alert:
Ordinarily, I’d be uninterested in this kind of display, but when I saw the post, I paused, because one of the celebrities Pratt so skillfully skewers here is his wife.
Pratt, 41, married Katherine Schwarzenegger, 30, last year, and she recently gave birth to the couple’s first child, Lyla Maria Schwarzenegger Pratt. When they got together in 2018, I assumed they had similar, perhaps center-right politics: Schwarzenegger is the daughter of Maria Shriver and the former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, and while Pratt has never definitively stated his political beliefs, he is open about his enthusiasm for guns and evangelical Christianity. In fact, Schwarzenegger and Pratt met through Zoe Church, one of the “hip” millennial evangelical worship centers in L.A. led by pastor Chad Veach. (Word is that Shriver ditched her daily mass habit at St. Monica’s for Zoe, and that she was the one to actually introduce the couple.)
When it comes to the 2020 election, however, it looks like Pratt and Schwarzenegger disagree (at least about how to voice their views). In addition to simply encouraging her followers to vote, Schwarzenegger also called the president’s recent statements on the coronavirus “trash” and shared her support for Biden this week. “If that tweet itself is not enough to get you fired up to want to elect Biden and get rid of Trump as president of our country, then I don’t know what is,” she said in an Instagram story.
Pratt, meanwhile, has said no more about the election publicly. What do you think the couple’s dinner table conversation is like? I’ll leave you with this image, taken last year, about a month after their wedding.
Speaking of evangelical Christians, Justin and Hailey Bieber are on the cover of Vogue Italia this month to promote … themselves, I guess. (Zoe’s Chad Veach was one of several celebrity pastors present at the couple’s religious wedding ceremony in South Carolina last year.) In the interview, Hailey, 23, revealed that she does not want to have a baby right now.
“The strange thing is that I’ve always wanted to have children early, but now that I’m married, I feel less of an urge,” she said. “I am an ambitious girl with many projects. It will happen, but not now.”
This makes the Biebers somewhat of an anomaly in the current celebrity landscape: Just about everyone else is taking advantage of the time off to have babies. If you want a full rundown of every somewhat notable personality who is currently gestating, People has you covered. In the meantime, I’d like to take a closer look at two announcements made this week.
Yesterday, People EXCLUSIVELY reported that singer and Twitter user Katharine McPhee, 36, is pregnant with her first child with husband David Foster, 70. This will be Foster’s sixth child. (His most famous offspring, Erin and Sara Foster, are actresses and writers who run in the Kate Hudson/Jen Meyer crowd. They happen to be just slightly older than McPhee.)
People secured several exclusive photos taken from multiple angles of Foster and McPhee “shopping for baby buys” in Montecito this week. I’m partial to the ones where McPhee is carrying her aging Chihuahua in a sling. Sources also confirmed the pregnancy to E! News.
"Katharine has always wanted to be a mom and to have a baby with David," an insider told the site. "They told their immediate family members about a month ago and everyone was very shocked and excited.”
I’ll bet!
Now compare that exhaustive tabloid rollout to Mindy Kaling’s announcement last night that she gave birth to a baby boy … over a month ago.
Kaling, who is also a mom to 2-year-old Katherine Swati Kaling (a lot of Katherines in this newsletter, I’m realizing), went her entire pregnancy without revealing the news. Yes, the Daily Mail published some photos of her in August where she looked like she could be pregnant, but none of the major American tabloids touched the story. It just goes to show that celebrities do have choices when it comes to sharing developments in their personal lives.
STUFF BY HILARY DUFF: This will be a recurring segment where I share what’s up with Hilary Duff. This week, Duff started filming the final season of Younger in New York (according to Deux Moi, she was spotted with her husband at Sweetwater in Williamsburg). She also appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan (UK) for some reason. But I’m still thinking about her Architectural Digest spread from last month, specifically the part where she explained how she chose the tile for her kitchen backsplash. “I feel like I went with something bold, and that’s a big part of my personality,” she said. Same!
Finally, I’ll leave you with a photo set that made me smile: Mary-Kate Olsen, on a New York sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and displaying her cords. Should I throw my AirPods out the window?
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And please feel free to send me your questions, comments, and concerns — who would you like to gossip about next week? I’d love to know.
I'm so glad this exists! I used to follow your column at The Cut religiously and miss it a lot. Gotta have my gossip fix!
i love this and i’m so excited for more 🖤