Let’s be real, we all love a bit of gossip — yes, even the people who claim they don’t. Whether it’s whispering about a coworker’s love life, dissecting an old high school friend’s cryptic Instagram post, or just WhatsApping late into the night about celebrities, gossip is a universal pastime. Men, women, kids, politicians, bikini waxers: everyone’s at it, and that’s OK.
Because guess what? It’s not just harmless fun; it’s actually good for us. Multiple studies — yes, by actual scientists who know gossip is so crucial that they’ve devoted their careers to analyzing it — suggest that sharing (and hearing) juicy tidbits helps us bond, build trust, and even regulate social behavior. It’s a normal way to make sense of the world and our place in it.
This means that even those often on the receiving end of gossip are just as fascinated by it as the rest of Us. After all, celebrities are human beings too – and a few of them have even bravely confessed to partaking in the fine art of gossip. But we have a hunch that there are quite a few more who indulge, too…
Chrissy Teigen
As your classic very online millennial, Teigen, 39, is a long-term listener, hunter and spreader of gossip. In fact, when she was first considering dating John Legend, the model and cookbook author went forensic on the gossip blogs to dig up dirt on her new man. “He was kind of known at the time for either being in the closet or a modelizer,” she told Vanity Fair. “I used to go on the websites and it was always either how I was his beard, or how he paid his past serious girlfriends, or how he was with some new model. Oh my god, I would read everything.”
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Teigen is also one for occasionally spilling little droplets of tea online about her fellow stars. For instance, she once tweeted: “The bigger the celeb, the nicer. I’ve met a lot of borderline people who had super attitudes lol (but also a lot of s***ty big celebs so I guess there is no clear path here).” Oh come on Chrissy, we need specifics!
Jennifer Lawrence
She might be a serious actress but when Lawrence, 34, isn’t busy dusting her collection of Oscars and Golden Globes, she’s getting down and dirty with reality shows like The Kardashians and The Real Housewives franchise — and gossiping about them. “I’m trying to stay up to speed with all this pointless gossip that goes down in Hollywood,” she told Vanity Fair in 2015, and also once said that her dream dinner party guests were Scott Disick, Luann de Lesseps and Bethenny Frankel. We’re definitely going to need to hear the gossip from that particular meeting of minds.
Rachel Bilson
Much like Summer, her character on The OC, Bilson is a very chatty one, always spilling the beans on podcasts — both her own, Broad Ideas, and the ones she’s an eager guest on.
She admits, though, that sometimes she takes it too far — for example, when she shared via Instagram an embarrassing old photo of actor Rami Malek, who she knew in high school, and he asked her to take it down. “It was straight to, ‘I would really appreciate it if you take that down; I’m a really private person,’” she revealed on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert. “I was like, ‘Oh s—, okay.’ I get like really hot. I, like, start sweating, and I get all nervous.”
Bilson has also been pretty open about her love life —for instance talking about how Samaire Armstrong slipped Bilson’s then-boyfriend Adam Brody some tongue while filming a kissing scene in The OC, and, more recently, confessing in 2022 that she missed her ex Bill Hader’s “big dick”. Wow, we certainly know who to turn to if we want to strategically place some hot gossip.
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Rihanna
Rihanna is another big star who admits she joins the escapism of gossipy reality TV shows — particularly Vanderpump Rules. “I honestly can’t get enough of it,” she told Women’s Health in 2021. “When watching reality TV, I can lie on my couch and switch my mind off from that’s going on. It’s my thing – and it’s pure escapism.”
Greta Gerwig
True gossip connoisseurs can get worked up about absolutely anything, but the juiciest nuggets are usually about people’s love lives — and acclaimed director Gerwig admits that she loves that stuff. “I really love Love Is Blind,” she said on the Smartless podcast in 2023. “I love it so much. I love people falling in love on television in their hearts. It just makes me so happy.”
Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift
These two were caught red-handed when photographers clocked them gleefully whispering at the 2023 Golden Globes — and word on the street was that their hot topic of choice was the romance between Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet. “Noooooo I told Taylor about two of my friends who hooked up,” Gomez later protested via Instagram. “Not that that’s anyone’s business.”
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Professional lip-readers weren’t so sure — but, whichever “friends” Gomez was really talking about, those facial expressions scream gossip, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Morgan Spector
The star of HBO’s The Gilded Age has some theories about gossip, telling The Cut that it’s key to understanding strangers. “If someone has a juicy tidbit, what’s better?” he said. “Talking about other people is one of life’s great pleasures. I think gossip is underrated. It usually gives you an atypical insight into someone else’s life, into how they live, into their character. It’s not just the scandal or the surprise; it’s also that you go, Oh, that’s who they are, and then you get to unpack that — at length, ideally.”
Gigi Hadid
Just like Us, Hadid admits to frequently falling down a rabbit hole of gossip online. “I usually stalk fans because I think they’re really funny on Twitter,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “They don’t know it, but I’ll just go through their timelines and if something is happening in the media, I always read fan accounts instead of the news because they have all the info and make the funniest jokes about it, so that’s how I get my gossip—by stalking fans. I end up like 35 family members down an Instagram of someone I don’t know.”
Oh yes, we’ve all done it. Especially to the Hadids.
Moby
During his long and impressive career in music as an artist and producer, Moby has been the subject of fevered gossip more than once — remember the Natalie Portman saga? — but it’s OK, he gets it. “More often than not, whenever gossip has been written about me, the gossip is more interesting than the reality,” he said in a 2008 Salon interview. “I know some public figures hate gossip, but personally I like it because it makes my life sound more glamorous and interesting than it really is.”
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Meryl Streep
Well, this is gossip in itself: one of the world’s most-respected actresses is just like Us too! Streep admits to finding the real world “overwhelming” and so often chooses to veg out to TV’s most gossipy shows instead. “What do I do? I go in and watch Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” she said in 2022, while promoting her climate change movie Don’t Look Up. “If we don’t survive, we won’t be able to watch Housewives or whatever.”
Ellen Degeneres
Degeneres is another big star who’s been gossiped about a ton over her many decades in show business but, while she might not enjoy it, she understands the appeal. Plus, the talk shows she’s most famous for are basically just a glossy place to gossip, right? “People love gossip,” she said in 2001. “It’s the biggest thing that keeps the entertainment industry going. I think I’m a good person, but every once in a while I hear something about somebody and I want to share that information. I feel bad about it, but that’s a really tough habit to stop.”
No! Never feel bad about gossip: remember, it’s the best way to make sense of the world, and bond with others.
