Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
Don’t get me wrong, I love our current era of Madison Square Garden celebrity mega-weddings and Italian honeymoon PDA (relationship maximalism is here to stay! You heard it here first!). But there’s also something to be said for the elegance of a couple so private about their whole deal that you kind of forget they’re together in the first place…which is exactly the vibe that Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge—who celebrated her 41st birthday today—and The Banshees of Inisherin writer-director Martin McDonagh give off.
Waller-Bridge and McDonagh were first linked after she was seen at a 2017 screening of his film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. She would later talk to the Guardian about seeing McDonagh’s play The Pillowman before they were dating, saying, “It was the first play I saw that made me think theater can be really exciting. Sometimes you need to see something like that—a piece of work that wakes you up, that makes you go, ‘Yes, of course that can be done’ and gives your imagination permission to go 17 million other places. I felt like that about his work.” Personally, I happen to feel like that about Waller-Bridge’s work—it’s been seven years and I still laugh about The Pencil on a regular basis—but to each their own!
Waller-Bridge has declined to talk about her nearly decade-long relationship with McDonagh many times, including, ahem, for a Vogue cover story, and I think that’s fairly wise: first of all, in the words of the great Sippie Wallace, “Women be wise, don’t advertise your man” (i.e. don’t brag about your relationship or you’ll tempt fate). Truly, the more PR you do for your relationship, the likelier it is that you’ll just be asked about it forever, especially if you’re a woman.
One of the few things we do know about Waller-Bridge and McDonagh as a couple is that they live—or have lived—together in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood, in a home that includes a gym and a drawing room (none too shabby!). Waller-Bridge has also said that the two writers don’t tend to swap scripts prior to handing them in, though she certainly values her partner’s opinions. “It’s really useful being with someone who I think is a genius, it just ups your game,” she told Vanity Fair in 2023. “I would always have wanted Martin McDonagh to think of my work as good, whether I was with him or not. I find out now, either way!”
All I can say is that I hope Waller-Bridge and McDonagh, wherever they may be, are living a modern-day fairy-tale life behind closed doors. (That is, until McDonaugh heads out to promote his next film.) I mean, with your own drawing room, how could you not be?
#Assume #Phoebe #WallerBridge #Martin #McDonagh
