Call it Wilde speculation. Call it life-Styles of the rich and famous. But over the course of the past, oh, we don’t know, 45 minutes, much of the internet has decided that Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles are dating — maybe, probably. For context, Wilde hired Styles to replace Shia LaBeouf in her directorial Booksmart follow-up, Don’t Worry Darling, in September 2020. Two months later, she confirmed publicly that she and Jason Sudeikis split up earlier that year, after nine years together. Now, on January 4, the Daily Mail shared paparazzi photos of Styles and Wilde entering Styles’s house together, with an inside source telling the tabloid, “Olivia and Harry have become close, and the pair have been spending a lot of time together in recent weeks. She has been seen visiting his home on several occasions.” But, surely, directors bond with their actors over the course of filming a movie, right?
Well.
Following the Daily Mail story, Twitter account @hsdcandids shared photos of Styles and Wilde holding (!) hands (!!) at his manager Jeff Azoff’s wedding. And this is no accidental, out of context, oops-this-hand-graze-has-become-a-hand-hold-despite-it-being-COVID-and-people-don’t-do-that-anymore-unless-they’re-bubbling-together hand hold. This is a deliberate public display of affection: Just look at all the stuff Styles had to shove into his left hand so he could hold hers with his right! There’s a crystal tumbler with a drink in it balanced precariously on two fingers, a full-on book in the crook of his thumb, and some sort of silky party favor/dog poop baggie shoved in there, too. To what ends would Harry Styles go — and with how many objects balanced in his left hand — to hold Olivia’s hand? If you photoshopped an iPhone, a lit cigar, and a whole wedding cake in there, we would not blink.
People confirmed that the wedding was this past weekend and quoted a source who said, “They have dated for a few weeks.” Poor Ted Lasso.
Updated at 2:30 p.m. because Harry Styles will not let us rest: We need to talk about the robe. At the bottom of the “Page Six” article that broke the photos of Wilde and Styles holding hands at Azoff’s wedding, there are more pictures, without Wilde. These ones show Styles holding a drink and a book, posing for pictures with the bride and groom, and that he had changed out of his tux into a hotel bathrobe and slippers. “THE ROBE” began to trend on Twitter with the subhead “Harry Styles fans are trying to figure out if he officiated his manager’s wedding in a bathrobe after new photos emerge online.” It would appear so.
