New Renée Zellweger boyfriend alert
Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: an actress gets a new boyfriend, a former tabloid star returns to the spotlight, and Hilary Duff rides on a shopping cart.
If you were Renée Zellweger, who would you date? I would probably see if, like, Pierce Brosnan was divorced yet, or maybe ask my manager to send an email to Antonio Banderas. But the actual Renée Zellweger has other ideas. TMZ exclusively reported yesterday that she is hooking up with the British automotive TV personality Ant Anstead:
Random Couple Alert!!!, indeed. Anstead is best known (in the U.S., anyway) for his marriage to HGTV star Christina El Moussa. Their December 2018 wedding made the cover of People (in a little bubble underneath the bigger celebrity wedding of that week, which starred Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth). El Moussa and Anstead finalized their divorce on...Monday.
Zellweger, 52, and Anstead, 42, reportedly met earlier this month on the set of Celebrity IOU Joyride, which is a spinoff of the Property Brothers’ show Celebrity IOU and is available on the Discovery+ app. Anstead is the host, and Zellweger was a celebrity guest. According to TMZ, “after Ant and Renee filmed their episode she actually returned to the set at some point to drop off some work boots for Ant.” A classic move!
Perhaps this pairing is not so surprising, given Zellweger’s varied dating history. She was most recently with the musician Doyle Bramhall II, and before that, she was briefly married to Kenny Chesney (she filed for an annulment in 2005, citing fraud). She also dated Bradley Cooper!
Zellweger has not yet been photographed with Anstead, but we can probably look forward to seeing them on some kind of double date with Zooey Deschanel and her property brother soon.
Speaking of varied public dating histories, Lindsay Shookus is back in the tabloids this week. The 41-year-old Saturday Night Live producer was spotted with none other than Alex Rodriguez at her birthday party in the Hamptons on Saturday. Rodriguez, 45, was seated right next to Shookus at the “intimate backyard gathering,” per Page Six. It sounds like everyone had fun: a person who self-identifies as “The Foodie Magician” performed for the assembled guests.
Why do you know the name Lindsay Shookus, if, in fact, you do? She famously dated Ben Affleck on-and-off from 2017 to 2019 (and maybe for a little bit before that, when he was still married to Jennifer Garner). Affleck, 48, is of course now dating Jennifer Lopez, 51, who dumped Rodriguez back in March. So the fact that Shookus and Rodriguez are spending time together in the Hamptons on Shookus’s birthday is at least somewhat interesting.
But are they dating? Rodriguez’s rep told Page Six, “There is absolutely zero there. They’ve been friends for 15 years.”
It’s true that Shookus, through her work at SNL, has become friendly with many different celebrities. After she and Affleck finally called it quits in 2019, she was rumored to be dating Jon Hamm. Us Weekly reported at the time that Hamm and Shookus attended the opening night performance of illusionist Derren Brown’s Broadway show together. But a source connected with Shookus told the tabloid they were “just friends and they have been for over a decade.”
I guess Shookus really likes spending time with long-term friends and also magic.
STUFF BY HILARY DUFF: Here’s a photo of Hilary Duff riding around on a Whole Foods shopping cart last Sunday.
Finally, I’ll congratulate Justin Timberlake on being the one person no one wanted to hear from this week:
I hope Britney figures out a way to sue him, too!
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Renee’s weirdest beau is hands down Jack White. Even Kenny Chesney made more sense in my book!