Jessica Biel is going through it
It's Gossip Time!
Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: an actress gets candid, an actor gets a pizza, and Romy Mars gets ungrounded.
Paid subscribers got an in-depth look at the Bennifer divorce rumors this week — click here to catch up! And don’t worry, we’re still talking about them today.
What is Jessica Biel ever doing? I have been asking myself this since she opened and pretty quickly closed a boozy restaurant for children in West Hollywood in 2016 called Au Fudge (a clever play on Oh Fuck). Since then, she has lobbied against childhood vaccine requirements in the state of California alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., launched a line of allergen-friendly vegan protein shakes for children, and most recently published A Kids Book About Periods, which is, I guess, what it sounds like: a book about menstruation for children, written by Jessica Biel.
To celebrate this achievement, Biel has been on a press tour the last couple of weeks. Her oft-carousing husband Justin Timberlake, meanwhile, is on an arena tour in support of his latest album. How is everybody doing with this arrangement? Well, Biel went to the Met Gala alone. And she purposefully shared that she bathed in 20 pounds of epsom salt to fit into her dress.
Then, she got a bob. And she called it a “fuck ass bob,” like the kids say.
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And then, she went on The View and revealed that marriage is hard. “It’s always a work in progress,” she said of her relationship. “It’s constantly trying to find the balance, trying to find the time we can connect. Thank goodness for Zoom and FaceTime!”
When Biel and Timberlake aren’t Zooming each other from the road, they now spend most of their time at their vacation homes in Nashville, Tennessee and Big Sky, Montana. Biel discussed this decision in another interview with Kelly Ripa on Sirius XM this week. “It's just trying to create some normalcy for these kids,” Biel said, referring to her sons Silas, 9, and Phineas, 4. “You get hammered [by the paparazzi] on the East Coast, you kind of get hammered on the West Coast. That's why we don't really live there anymore.”
That and the vaccine requirements for school-age children, perhaps. Anyway, sounds like everything is going great: Rapid weight loss, bob, clocking in on Zoom to work on marriage. All of this is making me super excited to check out A Kids Book About Periods. Why did Biel write it, by the way?
“Female reproductive health — people’s reproductive health — has just always been interesting to me,” she said on The View. “Wellness, you know, just all of these things in this space.” Mmhmm.
Bennifer Divorce Watch continues. On Wednesday, at a Mexico City panel promoting her confusing new A.I. thriller Atlas, a reporter asked Mrs. Jennifer Lynn Affleck directly if the “rumors” about her and Ben Affleck divorcing were true. Jen’s co-star Simu Liu cut the guy off, saying, “Okay, we’re not doing that. Thank you so much, guys. We really appreciate it.” Then Jen looked the reporter dead in the eye and said, “You know better than that.”
So did the media who attended this panel have to agree not to ask about the divorce rumors, even though they are kind of the only reason we’re talking about this movie in the first place? (I still don’t understand what it’s about; according to this lukewarm review in The Hollywood Reporter, Lopez plays a data analyst fighting against “the world’s first A.I. terrorist” while falling in love with a different A.I. who controls her battle suit). Page Six says yeah: Netflix reportedly banned all “personal” questions at the events for the film.
Ben, meanwhile, is still filming The Accountant 2 and staying in a $100,000-a-month rental in Brentwood a couple blocks away from Jennifer Garner and the kids. The Daily Mail caught him smoking and ordering Dominos yesterday. So he’s fine!
STUFF BY HILARY DUFF: A Poshmark entrepreneur is currently selling nail polish kits from the original Stuff By Hilary Duff line from 2004 for $85. Do I…?
Finally, I’ll leave you with the news that, despite her parents’ wishes, Romy Mars has officially become a “nepotism kid”:
The 17-year-old daughter of Sofia Coppola and Thomas Mars, who is most famous for attempting to charter a helicopter to visit her camp friend in Baltimore last year, is now a pop star. She released two songs produced by Claud this week, fresh off her appearance at Cannes with her grandfather Francis Ford Coppola. Go Romy!
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“You know better than that” is how I’ll be disciplining my dog from this day forward.
I always wonder about how it affects the kids to constantly be traveling between multiple homes, especially after the toddler years. Do they have friends in both places? If you're in an activity (sports, dance) it's not like you can leave in the middle of the season (I mean I guess you can, but that's not really a good thing to do). School I suppose can be done online. But it sounds lonely to me, especially if one or both parents are traveling for work (if Justin is on tour and Jessica is at the MetGala, I assume the nanny is homeschooling?)