Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: a pop star returns to the red carpet, an actress starts a campaign, and Hilary Duff wins an award.
Paid subscribers got an interesting-pap-photo roundup this week! I love doing these. Catch up here and tell me what you think is going on with Kate Bosworth…
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Thank God, Ariana Grande is back. When the 33-year-old pop star/comedienne wrapped her Eternal Sunshine tour in September, her reps released an (ill-advised, in my opinion) statement announcing that she would be “taking a step back from visibility” due to “endless, ongoing public scrutiny.” I mean, she definitely deserved a break. But I would have advised her to say nothing (always an option!) or to do a sit-down with Vogue regarding the speculation about her health and be done with it. Anyway, now she is contractually obligated to promote a movie, so we get to see her again — with her backup dancer ex-boyfriend from 2015 woohoo!
Grande and Ricky Alvarez, 35, walked the red carpet at the Focker-In-Law premiere at the Beacon Theatre in New York on Wednesday alongside her castmates Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, and Skyler Gisondo. It is actually amazing that she did not have an affair with Gisondo, 30, on set (that we know of), but I guess he is dating the insanely beautiful Sterling Point actress Ella Rubin. Grande and Alvarez, meanwhile, have been publicly together again since June, just after Grande leaked to the tabloids that she had broken up with her formerly married Wicked co-star Ethan Slater.
Alvarez’s current occupation is unknown, but he was, at one point, a backup dancer for Grande, and he famously appeared in the video of her licking a donut in 2015. He currently seems to be involved in every aspect of Grande’s life including promo for her beauty line:
I hope she gets married again! And if they get divorced, it’s okay — just ask Gossip Time’s Wisest Woman™ Amanda Seyfried.
The 40-year-old actress of the moment posted the following to her Instagram story this week:
This of course fits with her alleged belief that relationships only last for seven years.
Seyfried and Grande have a little bit in common, the more that I think about it: Seyfried met her soon-to-be-ex-husband Thomas Sadoski in rehearsals for an Off Broadway play in 2015 when she was still dating Justin Long and he was still married to the casting director Kimberly Hope.
Of course, people are now curious about Seyfried’s relationship with Nathan Fielder, who was, until recently, dating the author Emma Cline. Seyfried, Fielder, and Lance Oppenheim did their first interview together about You Can See Everything with Rolling Stone this week, and you can tell Seyfried is still hopped up on the whole experience (who wouldn’t be):
“There was always this vibration of risk and that sensation of: Am I going to destroy my career in some way? Am I going to get entangled in this, like, wasp’s nest with Billy? Am I gonna say the wrong thing? Am I gonna perpetuate negativity for her? Everything was scary, but I still had that drive that was more in the front seat — which was the literal front seat with you [Fielder] in the car. I was just like, ‘Let’s go, buddy! I want to put my hand in the fire!’”
Now this is an Oscar campaign I can get behind.
STUFF BY HILARY DUFF: Hilary Duff won the Outstanding Pop Tour of the Year Award at the Billboard Live Music Summit this week. Congrats!
Finally, I will leave you with this festive video of Keira Knightley revealing that she hasn’t seen Love, Actually since it came out and doesn’t know what people are talking about when they quote it to her:
“It means nothing to me.” Lol.
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