Last Week in Gossip: Taylor Ariana, Idris, Kim, and F1!

TNT wedding rumours, Ariana leaves SpongeBob, Elba and “woke” Bond, Phoebe Bridgers’ no-phone vibes, and Kim’s WAG era.

Apologies for the lateness of this one. I was at Zach Bryan’s Edinburgh gig last night and didn’t get to bed until about 2am! Anyway, welcome to the new week. Here’s what you might have missed from the previous seven days.

Are Taylor and Travis Really Getting Married at Madison Square Garden?

Spoiler: I doubt it.

TMZ has become utterly convinced that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding will take place at one of the most legendary venues in America. They're reporting that TNT will tie the knot on July 3rd for what The New York Post is describing as "being the biggest celebrity wedding arguably ever." The cost for the rental? $1 million a day, over three days, with more than 1,000 guests invited.

So, this is a weird claim, right? I know this pair are not publicity shy, and I bet Taylor would LOVE to claim the record of the biggest celebrity wedding of the year/decade. But MSG is fugly. It's not very private, although I'm sure they can make it so with enough security. These sources' claims are oddly specific, but in ways that don't ring true to me. I do not buy Swift as this kind of brash. She's a tacky billionaire, but usually one with tighter control of her image. Getting married in a concert/sports venue is, to put it bluntly, Kardashian sh*t.

Swift is also pretty good at keeping a tight rein on her private life when she wants to. Remember, we didn’t see her at a lot of public events or on paparazzi walks when she was with Joe Alwyn. TNT are massively public because they choose to be an inescapable power couple. I don’t buy for a second that a) she’d invite 1,000 people to her wedding, and b) that she’d reveal all the details to every single one of them when the event is reportedly still a while away. People talk. They brag. If someone leaked this and it was true, the crowds outside MSG would be impossibly large and probably put a bit of a damper on their plans. Remember the thousands of Swifties who turned up to Margaret Qualley and Jack Antonoff’s wedding because she was there?

I wonder if this is a red herring, either to weed out the unfaithfuls or throw the media off their scent. If I were Taylor, I’d go full Wagatha Christie in figuring out who’s likely to betray me. I think LaineyGossip was right on the money with this one: "What is the Occam’s Razor in this situation? What is the most obvious and simple explanation? That TNT would actually have a Kardashian wedding? Or that Taylor’s toying with the media?" I'm going with the latter.

Ariana and SpongeBob Break Up; Fork Found in Kitchen

Well, I for one am shocked. After three years together, Ariana Grande and her Wicked co-star Ethan Slater have called it quits. It was an "amicable" break-up, according to People. "They gave lots of time and careful consideration and decided to go their separate ways," the source told the publication. "They are still friends and very supportive of one another." The news comes as Grande launches her latest tour, so she's got a nice distraction from, you know, all of that.

I wish I had written this down somewhere and kept it in an envelope, but I SWEAR that I made a joke to a friend about how the pair would stick together until the second Wicked film’s awards run was over, then quietly break up because they wouldn’t want to draw attention away from the film or back to the scandal of how they got together in the first place. Slater’s ex-wife and mother of his young son, Dr Lilly Jay, made it pretty clear that her high school sweetheart leaving her while she was postpartum, then coincidentally shacking up with his co-star, was a painful experience. The Arianators were also pretty clear in their harassment of Jay. They needed a bit more inspiration for their next sing-along of “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored.”

Look, infidelity is commonplace, and in the celebrity world, it’s one of the few universal experiences that everyone has feelings about. There are few things relatable about mega-fame, but cheating? Everyone knows someone who’s cheated or been betrayed or been the third wheel. And Ariana is someone who has defined a big chunk of her image around her messy love life and, ahem, periods of romantic overlap. It was very easy to take sides on this matter. Largely the side of, “piss off SpongeBob.”

We have to be careful in discussing cheating stuff, I think. I’m not a prude nor am I someone for whom the “family values” dog-whistle works. We know how much it sucks to see the so-called “other woman” be derided as a slut and take all the blame for a man’s actions. Look at how many people still treat Angelina Jolie as a home-wrecker decades after she married Brad Pitt and he was revealed to be an allegedly violent thug against his own family. I’m not interested in denigrating Grande as some malicious husband-stealer. SpongeBob hardly resisted, right?

I am, however, fascinated in how Grande’s fanbase eagerly tries to maintain an impossible contradiction in image: the almighty girlboss of impeccable power and the wilting smol bean who can’t do anything for herself. It’s not unlike how Taylor Swift is talked about, honestly. Many stans need to maintain this strange opposition that makes their faves both indomitable and fragile. You can’t be both a multi-millionaire businesswoman idol and a child who doesn’t know right from wrong. It doesn’t work that way.

Grande is a complicated woman. She’s dealt with a lot of serious trauma and tragedy, has done incredible work for charity, has successfully made the transition to acting, and has pipes for days. She also frequently indulged in some questionable tanning and appropriation of racial beauty standards that have been the subject of discourse for well over a decade now. People are protective of her. I get it. But she’s also an adult and full of the paradoxes that come with that. It doesn’t seem all that hard to me to enjoy her music and also think she doesn’t need you to threaten to murder her ex’s ex. Again, it’s all over f*cking SpongeBob?

Is a Black Bond Too Woke? Idris Elba Thinks So

Idris Elba just got a knighthood. Personally, I think it’s much cooler when people turn down these archaic titles because no, thank you, to having “British Empire” anywhere near my name. He’s currently promoting Masters of the Universe, which means profile time with GQ. It’s bog-standard stuff. Elba is nothing if not a very charming man. He’s also clearly sick of being asked about James Bond. Long before Daniel Craig hung up his licence to kill, Elba was pushed as the natural choice to take over the role. He’s now probably too old for it, and definitely too famous. The current names being bandied about for the next movie, to be directed by Denis Villeneuve, are Jacob Elodri, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and Callum “Mr Dua Lipa” Turner.

Elba told GQ that the rumours of his casting were "never legit", and that "in realistic terms, some markets just don’t go for that. Bond is big all over the world. And [audiences] won’t [all] go for a Black male, an African male, playing Bond. That’s not what they like in their culture. Period." He added, “Bond is so unrealistic, so a hint of reality is good, but let’s not try and make it woke."