INVESTIGATIONS

How Did Taylor Swift, Joe Alwyn, Robert Pattinson, and Suki Waterhouse End Up on a Double Date?

Untangling the web of connection between a seemingly random group of Hollywood friends.


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Some of Hollywood’s squads or cliques make a kind of synergistic sense: the Saturday Night Live funny women hyping each other up and casting each other in their projects, or the cast of Big Little Lies, or honestly anyone who consistently hangs out with Gwyneth Paltrow. Others, not as much. Take the head-scratcher of Taylor Swift and her beau, Joe Alwyn, and Robert Pattinson and his maybe girlfriend, Suki Waterhouse. The foursome were reportedly spotted together on a double date in Los Angeles after one of Swift’s Wango Tango performances.

Which led us to ask: How?

But maybe this foursome isn’t as random as it first appears. Let’s untangle this celeb web.

The obvious connection here is Pattinson and Swift, who have at least one famous person in common: Taylor Lautner. Recall that Swift and Lautner dated years ago (they broke up in 2010), and their relationship was public at the height of the Twilight craze, at the center of which was Pattinson (duh). Lautner and Pattinson played a vampire and a werewolf, respectively, who competed for the heart of Bella Swan, played by Kristen Stewart, who is also Pattinson’s ex-girlfriend turned chum. (There’s also a connection between Stewart and Alwyn, who starred together in the 2016 film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.)

Whether or not Pattinson and Lautner are still in touch—or Swift and Lautner, for that matter—is still up for debate, but Stewart did turn up at Lautner’s birthday party last year, so it seems there is at least one Twilight friendship that is still going strong, 10 years after the release of the first film.

While this isn’t a timeline of Swift’s famous relationships, that’s probably the place to start to pull the thread. Let’s look at some of Swift’s exes: There is the aforementioned Lautner, Joe Jonas, Harry Styles, Jake Gyllenhaal, Calvin Harris, and John Mayer.

Jonas doesn’t appear to be linked to anyone else in this foursome, so forget about him for now. In 2012, Swift dated Styles, who was also linked to Cara Delevingne some time before that. Delevingne is a member of Swift’s original squad and appeared in the music video for “Bad Blood,” the song that was rumored to be about an alleged feud between Swift and Katy Perry. And Perry and Mayer are connected, to be sure. (They were on and off for a couple of years before she ended up with Orlando Bloom.) But Perry and Pattinson are also secret buds who once famously did some drunk karaoke together, a clip of which went viral a few years ago (and prompted everyone to wonder how those two became friends in the first place).

Also: Stewart is currently on and off with Stella Maxwell, but before she dated the supermodel she had a brief romance with Annie Clark (also known as St. Vincent), who famously dated Delevingne (and included her vocals on her most recent album).

Now, back to Swift for a sec. Her ex Harris has also dated Rita Ora, who costars in Detective Pikachu with Waterhouse. (Incidentally, they play two of the few live action actors and not CGI Pokémon). It seems that Waterhouse and Alwyn may actually be the two celebrities at the dinner table who did not have a direct connection to each other before Swift came along.

So there you have it: an exhaustive outline of the Swift-Alwyn-Waterhouse-Pattinson summit. Is this what they talked about over drinks too?

Related: Taylor Swift Wrote a Powerful Open Letter About LGBTQ Equality