Just a day after photos showed former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau shirtless, kissing passionately with Katy Perry on her yacht, the American pop singer appeared on stage in London, where a fan in the crowd proposed to her. “You know you really should have asked me about 48 hours ago,” she replied.
Later during the show, Perry spoke about her past romances with British men, including actor Orlando Bloom and her ex-husband, comedian and actor Russell Brand. “London, England, you’re like this on a Monday night after a whole day at work?" she asked the audience. "No wonder I fall for Englishmen all the time… but not anymore.”
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Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau
(Photo: Andy Kropa/Invision/AP, Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press/AP)
Last Saturday, Perry and Trudeau appeared to make the relationship official with a romantic date in Paris, celebrating her 41st birthday. In their first public outing as a couple, they attended a show at the legendary Crazy Horse cabaret club. Paparazzi, tipped off in advance, caught the two holding hands as they exited the club.
If we take the whispers seriously, the two are either head over heels in love, faking a romance for PR, or he's in a midlife crisis and she's rebounding after a long-term relationship. None of the theories would be surprising, and neither is the global interest. In that regard, not much has changed since the days of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.
Trudeau, 53, stepped down as Canada’s prime minister this past January after nearly a decade in office. He began his career as a global progressive icon and ended it as a deeply unpopular leader Canadians had grown weary of, regardless of how handsome he may be.
His political exit came about a year and a half after his separation from Sophie, his wife and the mother of his three children, and Trudeau found himself completely untethered.
He has always seemed like a natural celebrity. Even as a prime minister, he was known for world leaders making playful comments about his looks, comments he knew were laced with envy.
Celebrity was practically in his DNA. His father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a charismatic prime minister in his own right, had his own history of high-profile romances. But more on him later.
Perry, a pop icon with a two-decade career under her belt, ended her nine-year relationship with actor Orlando Bloom this past June. The two share a daughter, Daisy.
Just a month after the breakup, Perry was spotted with Trudeau. They were photographed having dinner together in Montreal, and two nights later, he attended her concert in the city. That was enough to spark rumors, though at that point, unsubstantiated.
Then came the yacht photos. Captured aboard Perry’s Caravelle off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, the images left little room for doubt. A whale-watching tourist, coincidentally or not, snapped the couple in a full embrace and sold the pictures to the Daily Mail. It, predictably, went viral.
As always in such cases, a wave of unnamed insiders suddenly emerges, different, of course, from “senior officials”, and they all claim to know exactly what’s going on.
A Canadian source close to the political world tells PEOPLE that Perry and Trudeau are "quite taken with each other. They are both smart and love to talk about serious issues." The source says they have taken it slowly because they are both very busy. "Justin thinks she is terrific," the source says. "It has had time to develop on a friend and intellectual level as well as supersized attraction."
A source close to Perry told PEOPLE that "When she first hung out with Justin, she wasn't looking to date, but they stayed in touch. He even flew to California to see her during a tour break. They have an easy connection. She finds him attractive."
But not everyone is convinced the romance is real. A source close to Trudeau told The Economic Times that the former prime minister’s inner circle believed that Perry organized the yacht photos.
“Come on, it’s too perfect,” the source said, “A tourist with a telephoto lens just happens to drift by off Santa Barbara at sunset? Please.”
An eyewitness supported that theory, telling the news outlet The Blast that Katy Perry "pulled up her boat next to a small public whale-watching boat, then they started making out. I didn't realize who she was with until I saw the tattoo on the guy's arm, and I immediately realized it was Justin Trudeau."
A Hollywood publicist added that “Katy understands image better than anyone, that yacht was her stage. “Katy doesn’t fake love, she frames it. She knows how to make a moment work. That kiss was strategy."
Other sources, perhaps the same ones, told the New York Post that Trudeau is going through a midlife crisis and now he’s free from the ties of office and his marriage.
American celebrities have long used yachts as glamorous backdrops for romantic displays. In the 1960s, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor vacationed on their yacht off the coast of Sardinia. In the 1970s, Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis were photographed sailing the Greek Isles aboard the Christina. In the early 2000s, Jennifer Lopez filmed her “Jenny from the Block” music video featuring then-fiancé Ben Affleck rubbing sunscreen on her backside.
As New Yorker writer Naomi Fry recently noted, the popularity of the celebs-on-a-yacht genre has reached new heights in recent years. "In 2025 alone, we’ve had, among many other examples, Leonardo DiCaprio and Vittoria Ceretti lounging deckside in view of Formentera; Dua Lipa and Callum Turner P.D.A.-ing off the Amalfi Coast; and Nina Dobrev and Zac Efron were photographed splashing in the waters of Sardinia."
Katy Perry is also close friends with two of the trend’s leading figures: Jeff Bezos and his new wife, Lauren Sánchez. Over the past two years, the couple has been nearly inseparable in photos taken aboard Koru, Bezos’s $500 million megayacht.
Perry herself has spent ample time aboard Koru. In April, she joined Sánchez and four other women for an 11-minute trip to space aboard Blue Origin, Bezos’s space venture. The internet mocked the stunt, and Perry became the butt of much of the ridicule; what’s a pop singer doing in orbit, after all?
Meanwhile, her career has seen brighter days. Perry’s ongoing The Lifetimes Tour is commercially successful, but in the past seven years, she has stayed mostly in the headlines through her role as a judge on American Idol.
She’s far removed from her hit-making prime of more than a decade ago. Publicity with a handsome, high-profile political figure certainly can’t hurt.
“I don’t think anyone that knows him is surprised that Justin would date someone famous,” another source told the New York Post. “It does echo his father. It’s in his DNA to do this.”
That comment may be more insightful than it seems. Justin Trudeau is a political nepo baby through and through, the eldest son of Pierre and Margaret Trudeau, both of whom were arguably far more interesting than he is.
Pierre Trudeau served as Canada’s prime minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984. His entry into Canadian politics sparked such excitement that it was dubbed “Trudeaumania.” An intellectual charmer who bore a strong resemblance to Justin, albeit with less luck in the hair department, Pierre had his own string of high-profile romances, including with Barbra Streisand and Kim Cattrall.
Pierre Trudeau was 50 when he started dating Streisand, who was 27 at the time. They met in 1968 at the premiere of Funny Girl, while she was going through a breakup with actor Elliott Gould.
In her memoir, Streisand wrote that Trudeau was "very dapper, intelligent, intense ... kind of a combination of Albert Einstein and Napoleon (only taller). And he was doing important work. I was dazzled."
After a brief romance, she said she was "a bit scared of the intensity of this relationship," admitting that "for me, there was something missing. My brain was in love, but not my body."
The two remained close friends until he died in 2000, after which she said, "the world lost a great leader ... and I lost a great friend," she says.
Pierre also briefly dated actress Kim Cattrall in 1981, well before her Sex and the City fame. "He was so incredibly sexy. He was very soft-spoken, incredibly smart, sensitive," the actress once said.
In 2016, CBS was forced to make an embarrassing apology after a 60 Minutes feature with Justin mistakenly aired a photo of Pierre and Cattrall while Justin was speaking about his mother, Margaret.
Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Sinclair, who is 29 years younger, married in 1971 and had three sons. One of them, Michel, was tragically killed in a 1998 avalanche in British Columbia. He was 23 years old. His body was never found.
The couple split after 13 years, and following their divorce, Margaret Trudeau was romantically linked to Jack Nicholson, Ryan O’Neal and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones.
In her autobiography, in which she openly discusses her struggle with bipolar disorder, Margaret wrote of those years, “I became a cover girl, a celebrity in an age before the celebrity culture, famous for nothing except for my scandalous behavior.”
In short, Justin Trudeau is low-key compared to his adventurous parents, but he is stepping into his own celebrity era in a very different time than the one in which his father once broke Hollywood hearts.
In the end, it’s just another chapter in a centuries-old story of attraction between politicians and celebrities, those who run the world and those who provide its soundtrack, its glamour, its fantasy. It’s always been that way.
Compared to legendary pairs like Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy, the Trudeau-Perry saga currently feels more like a curiosity than a turning point. Both of them could use a boost. Both enjoy the spotlight. And both understand that the world is obsessed with these pairings, not because they’re love stories (sometimes they are, most often they’re not), but because they offer scandal, spectacle and a dose of fantasy that demands only a few seconds of attention. Which, frankly, is about all people have time for anymore.
Five other famous couples who paired politics with the glamorous world
Cleopatra and Julius Caesar
Cleopatra didn’t know she was a “celebrity” when Julius Caesar arrived in Egypt in 48 BCE and pursued her. Their alliance brought Rome Egyptian grain and secured Cleopatra’s reign.
After Caesar’s assassination, Marcus Antonius took his place in both politics and Cleopatra’s bed. He was Rome’s charismatic populist; she was the most powerful woman in the Mediterranean. Together, they had big plans, but it all ended in war and a double suicide.
Despite Cleopatra’s enduring image as a seductress, her relationships with Caesar and Antonius were primarily political. She utilized the only power available to her - strategic alliances. Sex was just another tool.
Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy
Their affair was never officially confirmed, but it didn’t need to be. Monroe famously acknowledged it in her own inimitable way.
In May 1962, at a Democratic Party fundraiser at Madison Square Garden that also celebrated JFK’s 45th birthday, Monroe arrived fashionably late (as always) wearing a skin-tight, nearly transparent silk dress covered in 2,500 rhinestones. Her breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” left little to the imagination.
Kennedy embodied power wrapped in charisma, masking deep physical and emotional struggles. Monroe was the embodiment of Hollywood glamour, masking her own pain. Together, they formed a fantasy that has never faded. Monroe died just three months later. The romance the world was fascinated by, yet never truly saw, lives on in legend.
Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner
Taylor was married eight times to seven different men. One of them was U.S. Senator John Warner, whom she met on a blind date in 1976. They married quickly (helping Warner win a Senate seat in 1978) and divorced six years later. Taylor later wrote that they remained friends, but she "just couldn’t bear the intense loneliness" as he threw himself into politics.
Elizabeth wrote in her book "Elizabeth Takes Off", “I don’t think I’ve ever been so alone in my life as when I was Mrs. Senator, and I don’t blame my ex-husband. He never pretended to be anything but a man devoted to public service, and once that service began in earnest, I had to take a backseat to his constituency.”
Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden
Fonda, another Hollywood icon, took a different path, falling not just in love with politics, but with a politician. Her marriage to radical leftist and California state legislator Tom Hayden was less about tabloid headlines and more about ideological partnership.
Fonda, one of the most prominent activist figures in American film history, and Hayden made plenty of good trouble together until they divorced in 1990 after 17 years of marriage.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver
Schwarzenegger flipped the script - a celebrity who married into politics. His union with Maria Shriver, niece of John and Bobby Kennedy, gave him a direct link to America’s most storied political dynasty and the legitimacy he needed to become the governor of California.
Their 25-year marriage ended after it was revealed that Schwarzenegger had fathered a child with the family’s longtime housekeeper.