So far, though, the aspect of the film that has attracted the most attention is the rumor that Phillippe and his costar Abbie Cornish became romantically involved on set and are currently dating. The film was shot in the summer and fall of 2006, just as Phillippe’s marriage was falling apart. After the film wrapped, he says, the two did not see each other for months and only at the end of last year began to spend time together again. But, he insists, they are not a couple.
“She and I are close friends, and as far as if there is any future, that is not where we are at now,” he says. “That is what other people like to say or like to assume. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a friendship, and we are getting to know each other in a really difficult situation.”
Cornish was labeled the “other woman” after it was rumored that the two slept together during production on Stop-Loss. Asked about the veracity of the gossip in a rather blunt manner, Phillippe bursts out laughing and says, “First of all, I wouldn’t answer that, but I would say that things are never as simple as it’s made out to be in the tabloid press. It was unfair for her to be called the names that she was, because it wasn’t about that. I don’t think an outside person can ever cause a divorce. I had difficulties in my relationship, and in my marriage, long before I ever met her.”
Phillippe with Amanda Peet and Kieran Culkin in Igby Goes Down.
Phillippe is weary of seeing his personal life played out in public. “If you are going through the worst time of your life, the last thing you ever want is for the rest of the world to have an opinion about it, or feel like they have a say,” he says. “That is the primary struggle with being famous. You still have to live and deal with it in your own personal way, but you also have to accept and understand that it’s public knowledge.”
As any reader at the checkout aisle knows, Phillippe and the two-years-younger Witherspoon met in 1997 at her 21st-birthday party. They married two years later and had two children, Ava, now eight, and Deacon, now four. In the public eye, their relationship became something of a test case for such burning pop-psych questions as whether a marriage can survive when the woman earns more money and is, by most accounts, more successful.
Phillippe says these popular diagnoses of his failed union widely miss the mark. “I certainly understand the level of interest that comes along with a public marriage,” he says, “and with being married to someone like Reese, who so many people love with good reason. People want answers. But I think sometimes they wouldn’t be happy with what the answers would be.”
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