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.
I’ll admit it: my face automatically settled into an eye roll of Liz Lemon-esque proportions when I read this week that director Paul Thomas Anderson had told Licorice Pizza star Cooper Hoffman to work as a “COVID production assistant” on the set of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans in 2021. As Hoffman related to the Hollywood Reporter: “He told me, ‘You’ve seen how this side lives, now you have to see the other side.’” As if it’s not difficult enough to land a PA job in Hollywood without the children of famous actors swooping in! (But Hoffman quickly won me back by charmingly discussing his aversion to bothering Anderson for roles. “Can you imagine if I texted him, like, ‘Part for Coop?’ You don’t do that to Paul.”)
Happily, Hoffman’s life as an actual performer seems to be going pretty swimmingly these days—he stars opposite Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki’s erotic comedy-thriller I Want Your Sex, out now—and his personal life is no less blessed. The 23-year-old actor has been dating actress Nico Parker, whom he met on the set of Maude Apatow’s directorial debut Poetic License in late 2024. “We didn’t officially start dating until a few weeks after filming, when she came to New York to meet my mom, and I asked her to be my girlfriend,” Cooper told THR. “It was very sweet.” (We could not agree more.)
Parker—who received a BAFTA Television Award nomination for her role in The Last of Us in 2025—is actress Thandiwe Newton’s daughter, and Hoffman, of course, is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, making this a nepo-for-nepo match that I can fully endorse. It truly must be weird as hell to inhabit the rarefied world of Hollywood nepo-dom, so I imagine there’s something nice about being in a relationship with someone in the same boat.
I know I’m getting ahead of myself here, given that these two crazy kids are only in their early twenties, but what if they eventually go on to start a family and release a rare breed of third-generation Hollywood nepo-ling into the universe? I mean, that baby’s Oscar would practically be engraved from birth! (Unless it decided to become a teacher or a doctor or whatever… in which case I’m sure its family would find a way to be proud of it nonetheless.)
