The Unlikely Celebrity Couples We’re Already Way Too Invested In

What would Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau discuss over dinner? This is not a hypothetical question. The pop star and the former prime minister of Canada were seen locked in conversation over lobster and steak tartare at a posh Montreal restaurant, Le Violon, on Monday. Both are single: Trudeau separated from his wife in 2023, and Perry from Orlando Bloom earlier this summer. The internet, naturally, has whipped up a whirlwind of speculation that they might be (or might be becoming) a couple. Emphasis on might be. “We kind of got the vibe that they were a little more chill,” Le Violon’s less-than-discreet communications consultant told the Associated Press. “No visual signs of PDA or anything.” Still, we can dream—especially given Trudeau was filmed belting out Perry’s “Dark Horse” at her concert in Montreal on Wednesday.

So back to that dinner conversation, which you can easily imagine having a slight tint of melancholy to it. The 2010s were very kind to Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau. She landed five number one singles from her 2010 album Teenage Dream—tying a record set by Michael Jackson’s Bad—and all three of the albums she released that decade went to number one too. In 2015, Trudeau became prime minister of Canada, and spent years as a hunky, tousle-haired icon of liberal politics.

But no one stays on top forever. Perry’s commercial performance has spluttered since her 2020 album Smile, and the rollout of its follow-up 143 was a string of PR disasters. Her recent voyage into space, with an all-female team including Jeff Bezos’s then-fiancée Lauren Sánchez, was widely ridiculed for being faux-progressive and girlboss-y. Trudeau was only able to scrape minority governments together in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 elections, and in January, faced with abysmal polling numbers, he resigned. There’s something strangely endearing, even moving, about the prospect that the two of them have found a potential soulmate going through similar troubles. At the very least, they can swap recommendations for crisis-PR agencies.

Any strange celebrity couple, confirmed or rumored, past or present, is to be heartily welcomed. Why? Because they’re fun, that’s why. Rich and/or hot and/or successful people tend to be quite alike, especially if they work in or around Hollywood. Their couplings and re-couplings blur into one—every 18 to 36 months, the leading men and the leading women reshuffle each other, and only TMZ obsessives can keep track of all of it.

The stranger relationships stick out. Strange, sometimes, because of the gulf between the pair’s respective spheres of operation. The politics-entertainment crossover, as with Perry and Trudeau, is a rich source of odd couples. Take Trudeau’s father Pierre—also a Canadian PM, and clearly a good multi-tasker, given he went out with Barbra Streisand and Superman actor Margot Kidder at different points in his premiership.

There’s former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and singer Carla Bruni, a real ride-or-die pairing despite his multiple convictions for corruption (and her five-inch height advantage). There’s onetime Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik and the Cheeky Girls’ Gabriela Irimia. And there’s Liam Fox, former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s defense secretary, who dated Natalie Imbruglia in the ’90s and claims he convinced her to release “Torn” as a single (good advice, for which he got a credit on her album Left of the Middle). Elon Musk and Grimes also, who are a very similar kind of weird, given they were both happy to name one of their kids “X Æ A-12”.

Some relationships are strange simply because the respective vibes seem wildly different. Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi. Cher and Tom Cruise. Janet Jackson and Matthew McConaughey. Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson. Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black. Maybe, if their loved-up Naked Gun press appearances are to be believed, Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson. A personal favourite, Kelis and Bill Murray, who overcame a 28-year age gap to have a “whirlwind summer romance” in 2023. In 2003, Kelis released “Milkshake”. In 2003, Bill Murray starred in Lost in Translation. Not so similar aesthetically. But love always finds a way.

And that’s the real glory of these couples. They jolt us out of our usual cynicism about groomed, stage-managed stardom and remind us that these are actual, real people, with emotional and sexual appetites as varied and unpredictable as regular civilians. That, as well as provoking mind-melting thought experiments about what the hell some of them were able to talk about with each other.

This story originally appeared in British GQ.