The Week Drake Declared War on Everyone (And I Got My Dawson's Creek Facts Wrong)

It has been a big weekend. Drake dropped three albums and took aim at half of Hollywood. Rihanna introduced her daughter to the world in a Dior Haute Couture diaper. And I discovered that apparently I have been rewatching Dawson's Creek in my head with the wrong cast. Multiple readers very kindly pointed out that from Friday’s newsletter that Michelle Williams played Jen Lindley, not Joey Potter. My apologies. The reruns are on in the background as I type this, and I can confirm she is extraordinary in both roles I apparently assigned her.

If you have any celebrity tips or story ideas you’d like me to investigate, please reply to the email. Enjoy!

There’s no fuzzy hospital photo for the moms and aunties on Facebook for Rihanna… When Rihanna introduces her daughter to the world, she does it with a photo portfolio by one of the most esteemed fashion photographers alive, Tim Walker, a custom Dior Haute Couture diaper by the most covetable designer of the last decade, Jonathan Anderson on the cover of W Magazine's Pop Issue. The supporting cast is Mariah Carey, A$AP Rocky, SZA, Pharrell Williams, Mary J. Blige, Sarah Paulson, and Donald Glover, all gathered to pay tribute. Rocki is her third child with A$AP Rocky, following sons Rza in 2022 and Riot in 2023. The W feature is as much a cultural document as a fashion shoot, an inventory of what one woman has built and who she has become. Fenty Beauty redrew the cosmetics industry. Savage x Fenty did the same for lingerie. Her LVMH partnership put her at the pinnacle of fashion. And through all of it, by every account in these pages, she has remained disarmingly, stubbornly herself.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The Dior Haute Couture diaper will dominate the conversation and rightly so. It is a perfect piece of image-making; audacious, witty, and completely on brand for a woman who has never once done the expected thing. But the W feature is really a record of something much larger. Rihanna has crossed into the rare territory occupied by artists who have transcended their original category entirely. She arrived as a pop star. She is now a mogul, a cultural institution, and a mother whose approach to all three roles has consistently set the agenda rather than followed it. 

At the Cannes press conference for his film Paper Tiger on Saturday, Adam Driver was asked about Lena Dunham's memoir Famesick, in which she described him as "something feral" and "half-man, half-beast," claiming he once hurled a chair at a wall next to her while filming Girls. Driver kept his response brief: "I have no comment on any of that. I'm saving it all for my book," he said, sparking laughter from the audience. 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: "I'm saving it all for my book" is the most elegantly threatening sentence anyone has uttered at a Cannes press conference in years. It neither confirms nor denies anything. It just opens a door and closes it again immediately. Driver understands that silence, precisely deployed, does more than any denial.

Harry Styles launched his Together, Together world tour in Amsterdam's opening with "Are You Listening Yet?" before delivering a 20-song set to a sold-out crowd. During the show, a voicemail played over the stadium screens as Styles walked through a wooded area on film, with a voice fans immediately identified as Zoë Kravitz asking, "Harry, are you going out tonight? There's this amazing party I want to take you to." Kravitz herself was in the crowd in a cream midi dress, oversized black fur coat, baseball cap and sunglasses, sitting alongside Styles' mother Anne Twist, with fan videos showing both women dancing and singing together throughout the night. Engagement rumours have been building since April, when a diamond ring was spotted on Kravitz's left hand during a London outing, though neither has confirmed anything publicly.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Harry Styles played a woman's voice over 60,000 people, sat her next to his mother, and of course said nothing. Anne Twist dancing beside Zoë Kravitz while the man they both love performs below them is all the confirmation the world is going to get.

I wouldn’t usually write about these folks but this is one that follows the classic Celebrity Intelligence mantra “the story is bigger than the star” so it makes it worth telling… Venezuela Fury, eldest daughter of heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury, married amateur boxer Noah Price at the Royal Chapel of St. John on the Isle of Man on Saturday, in a white lace fishtail gown with a 50-foot train and a pair of Crocs. I know it’s easy to get distracted by the crocs but… AT THE AGE OF 16!!!!! The couple first connected when Venezuela was 14 and Noah slid into her Instagram DMs, had a rocky on-and-off period involving arguments and, by Venezuela's own account, a few side girls, Noah then proposed on her 16th birthday, having first gone to ask Tyson Fury's permission, which by any measure required a considerable amount of nerve - he’s a boxer…The wedding could not have taken place in England, where the law was changed in 2023 to raise the minimum marriage age to 18 regardless of parental consent. The Isle of Man permits marriage at 16 with parental permission. 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: At Home With The Furys has been the number one Netflix show in the UK and filmed the wedding (of course!) as part of its upcoming series. American audiences have been slower to find it, but a 16-year-old wedding filmed for Netflix and generating global headlines is precisely the kind of story that changes that. The statistics on young marriage are not straightforwardly encouraging. The median age at first marriage in the US is now 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, the highest figures in recorded history, and research suggests that waiting until 28 to 32 significantly reduces the risk of divorce. That said, the narrative that marrying young is always a mistake is not quite right either. Divorce odds actually increase by around 5% for every year over 32 that someone waits, and approximately 41% of first marriages end in divorce, down from the often-quoted 50%. Paris and Tyson Fury married young and have been together for twenty years. It is not a template that works for most people. But it worked for them. Congratulations and genuine good luck to Venezuela and Noah. 

Alex Cooper, the host of Call Her Daddy and one of the most powerful voices in podcasting, has announced she is expecting her first child with husband Matt Kaplan. Cooper shared the news on social media, posting a series of images. The announcement comes at a significant moment for Cooper, whose public profile has rarely been higher — but also at the end of a bruising stretch. Her very public feud with Alix Earle dominated entertainment conversation for weeks, dividing their shared audience and generating the kind of sustained negative attention that is difficult to outrun. Then came a damning Bloomberg investigation into her company that raised serious questions about how the business behind the Call Her Daddy empire is actually run. It has been, by any measure, a difficult year.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: There is something quietly fascinating about what a pregnancy announcement does to the cultural temperature around a celebrity. Whatever noise surrounds them (the feuds, the criticism, the damaging press) tends to go still, at least for a moment. The world has a remarkable collective instinct to stop and sit with someone's baby joy. It is not a strategy. It is not a reset button. It is a life moment of the most profound kind, and audiences respond to it as exactly that. 

At a career retrospective during the Cannes Film Festival, Peter Jackson was asked about Ryan Gosling’s long-standing claim that he was fired from The Lovely Bones because he gained 60 pounds for the role. Jackson declined to name Gosling but said, “Anytime we recast an actor, it’s actually our fault because we didn’t get the casting right. It’s not because they did anything wrong. Ryan is a fantastic actor.”  Mark Wahlberg ultimately played the role in the 2009 film.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Taking the blame for a casting decision seventeen years after it happened, without quite confirming the story, is a very specific kind of Hollywood grace. Jackson is essentially saying: whatever the public thinks happened, the responsibility was ours. That kind of accountability is rarer than it should be.

Every year, journalists at Cannes sit in the Grand Théâtre Lumière with stopwatches, timing standing ovations to the second as if the duration means something. It doesn't, really. The record is 22 minutes for Pan's Labyrinth. A four-minute ovation is now considered a polite dismissal. Who would imagine that the French are the most positive and enthusiastic nationality when it comes to film reception?!? 

This year Cannes hasn’t been exactly scintillating but here, so far, is your  French applause guide,  in order of enthusiasm: 

Sheep in the Box (Kore-eda) — 3.5 mins.

Fatherland (Pawlikowski, Sandra Hüller) — 6 mins. The director told the crowd he hoped "at least fifty percent of you really meant it." 

Hope (Na Hong-jin, starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander) — 6 mins. A Korean alien invasion epic that jolted the festival awake on Sunday night.

Club Kid (JordanFirstman, starring Cara Delevingne and Diego Calva) — 7 mins. Firstman cried, kissed co-star Calva, and hoisted his 13-year-old co-star into the air.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Starring Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder) — 9 mins.

Paper Tiger (James Gray, starring Adam Driver and Miles Teller) — 10 mins. Gray jokingly pointed at his watch, willing the crowd to keep going. 

All of a Sudden (Hamaguchi) — 11 mins, punctuated by screams of "bravo," after a three-hour-sixteen-minute film that left the audience openly weeping.

Garance (Jeanne Herry, starring Adèle Exarchopoulos) — 12 mins, currently the festival's longest ovation. Exarchopoulos plays a jobbing actress navigating alcoholism, family tragedy, and love.

After TMZ published footage of Cardi B visibly yelling at Stefon Diggs outside a coffee shop in Burtonsville, Maryland, with an eyewitness reporting the exchange lasted more than ten minutes, Cardi went to X with her explanation.  She wrote, “Sometimes I forget I’m a celebrity… damn y’all ain’t never cuss your babydad out when you hungry?” 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Celebrity culture has conditioned us to read every public argument as a brand crisis. Cardi’s response is a reminder that sometimes a co-parenting row is just a co-parenting row, and that the most disarming PR move is radical relatability and transparency.

Joshua Bassett, 25, has opened up about a years-long ketamine addiction that began after a near-fatal health crisis in January 2021, tied to the release of his new memoir Rookie: My Public, Private, and Secret Life. He was hospitalized with septic shock and heart failure at twenty, losing 20 pounds in days, with doctors giving him a 30% chance of survival. The hospitalization landed the same day he released his single "Lie Lie Lie," as Olivia Rodrigo's "Drivers License" was consuming the internet and his name was at the centre of it. He told the Zach Sang Show he subsequently used "anything to make me numb at any given time," consuming six baggies of ketamine by himself every night, "It's truly a miracle it didn't take my life," he said. 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Bassett was twenty years old when the internet turned his personal life into a culture war while he was simultaneously fighting for his life in a hospital he didn't know about. His story is far from unique. Recreational ketamine use among US adults rose 81.8% between 2015 and 2019, and a further 40% between 2021 and 2022. Around 60% of ketamine-related emergency room visits involve young adults aged 18 to 30. That he is twenty-five, alive, and describing clearly the connection between mental health and addiction and the dangers of drug use is valuable to society. If you or someone you know is struggling, contact SAMHSA at 1-800-662-HELP.

Your browser gets you to a page. Norton Neo gets you to the answer. The first safe AI-native browser built by Norton moves with you from idea to action without slowing you down. Magic Box understands your intent before you finish typing. AI that works inside your flow, not beside it. No prompting. No copy-pasting. No switching apps.

Built-in AI, instantly and for free. Privacy handled by Norton. Built-in VPN and ad blocking protect you by default. No configuration. No extra apps. Nothing to think about.

Fast. Safe. Intelligent. That's Neo.

Download Norton Neo

On my favorite podcast How to Fail With Elizabeth Day, Emilia Clarke walked through surviving two brain aneurysms during the run of Game of Thrones, saying, “I was just convinced that I had cheated death and I was meant to die and every day, that was all I could think about.”  She also revealed that during the first hemorrhage, lying in a hospital in London, her immediate thought was how to continue filming, adding, “I was so ashamed that this thing had happened and that the people who had employed me might see me as weak.”  

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: That a woman nearly died twice while playing one of the most powerful characters on television, and her first instinct was shame that her employers might think less of her, says everything about what the entertainment industry has historically demanded of women. Clarke survived the part and the industry.

Celebrity Intelligence is a reader-supported publication covering how the entertainment industry, pop culture and celebrity really work. Subscribe for exclusive reporting, insider scoops, and full access to every issue.

Drake released three albums simultaneously on Friday: Iceman, the long-anticipated ninth studio album, plus two surprise companion projects, Maid of Honour and Habibti, totalling 43 tracks.  By Friday afternoon Spotify confirmed he had become the most-streamed artist in a single day in 2026, with Iceman the year’s most-streamed album and opening track “Make Them Cry” the most-streamed song in a single day.  The critical reception split sharply down the middle. The lyric sheet reads like a court docket: fans immediately identified apparent shots at Kendrick Lamar, LeBron James, Jay-Z, J. Cole, Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, DJ Khaled, Pharrell, and Travis Scott . 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: The reviews don’t really matter. The beef does. Drake understood something the music industry keeps relearning: controversy is the most reliable distribution mechanism ever invented. Whether Iceman is a masterpiece or a sulk set to beat is almost beside the point. The names he dropped kept him on every feed, in every conversation, and at the top of every chart within hours of release. Kendrick Lamar defeated him. He just built his comeback on the rubble.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

After Ryan Lochte, 41, posted a video announcing his new assistant swimming coach position at Missouri State University, fans declared him “unrecognizable,” with some comparing him to FBI Director Kash Patel. When his girlfriend Molly Gillihan told him his phone was “blowing up,” Lochte replied, “Oh, so they’re taking a picture from when I was working out every day, getting makeup put on me for photo shoots, back in 2012 in the Olympics. We’re in 2026. What’s that, 14 years? You think I aged?”  Gillihan admitted she had used eyebrow dye on his hair just before the video.

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: Aging in the public eye is brutal, it’s just rare a man has to endure the negative narration like women do.

George Clooney's Parenting Advice Is "Don't Mix Grain and Grape"

On the red carpet at the King's Trust Celebration at Royal Albert Hall, British Vogue asked George and Amal Clooney what life advice they give their eight-year-old twins, Alexander and Ella. George replied: "Don't mix grain and grape. I think that's important for the children to know. Don't mix the two." Amal followed with the slightly more earnest: "I think we want them to stay curious, ask lots of questions, and challenge the things that don't make sense to them, like much of what is going on in the world." 

Celebrity Intelligence Takeaway: What a perfect balance of parents… One of the world's leading human rights lawyers and one of the world's warmest and funniest actors provide the perfect balance.

I hope you enjoyed this edition and took something away from Celebrity Intelligence. Let me know if you have any tips or if there’s something you want to read about or for me to investigate. And please forward this to someone who'd appreciate it. Have a great week!