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—or, occasionally, good friends—that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
Like most people, I love comedian and The Bear star Ayo Edebiri with an arguably parasocial passion (that’s only partly born from the fact that she was very nice when I drunkenly talked to her at the Bottoms after-party at last year’s SXSW…but enough about me name-dropping celebrities I’ve alarmed). That’s why when I heard that Edebiri and Paul Mescal had posted an adorable photo together in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, my heart started racing and my head was lost in visions of the two of them starring in a rom-com together.
If you need some context for why Edebiri felt compelled to commemorate St. Patrick’s Day, you should definitely start by watching the Letterboxd video in which she slips into a pretty effortless Irish lilt while pretending that she played Jenny the donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin. Ever since that moment, the gorgeous and proud nation of Ireland has claimed Edebiri as its own (despite the fact that the 28-year-old actor was born to Barbadian and Nigerian parents in Boston)—and the lovefest has worked both ways, with Edebiri embracing the bit and continually shouting out Ireland throughout awards season.
Okay, now that the Ireland of it all has been explained, let’s get back to the major question at hand here: Are Edebiri and Mescal…more than friends? I’m no body-language expert, but the photo that Edebiri posted on her Instagram Stories is kind of giving “we kissed recently, and we haven’t really talked about the implications of it yet, but we like hanging out.” (Am I extrapolating too much from a photo of two people sitting in a stairwell? Maybe.) Edebiri, for her part, was last reported to be dating writer and actor Colin Burgess, but they allegedly keep their relationship very private; the most recent dating rumors to encircle Mescal, meanwhile, have involved actor Sophie Wilde, and, of course, he famously dated Phoebe Bridgers from about 2020 to 2022. Still, there’s no confirmed GF in Mescal’s life (at least not according to the Extremely Online Fan community, and they would know), leaving me to wonder: Is it possible that Mescal and Edebiri could actually be a thing?
Even if Edebiri and Mescal aren’t together (which, I should emphasize, they may very well not be, given that it is, in fact, legal for two hot, famous, funny people to simply share a stairwell and an Instagram selfie), I refuse to give up my dream of a rom-com starring the two of them. Mescal even said he’s down and that Edebiri would be his dream costar. (X sleuths have also noted that Edebiri’s snap was reposted by the writer Emily Henry, whose novel Book Lovers is being adapted for the screen…which could mean nothing…or something?)
In my ideal world, Nora Ephron would have dreamt up this project before her passing, but what if Edebiri and Mescal wrote and starred in it together? Can you even imagine? Give the people what we want, Hollywood powers that be!