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The Strategic Love Story of Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry
Over the past few months, the Justin Trudeau-Katy Perry relationship has played out like a symphony.
The build-up began innocently enough: pictures of the former prime minister and the American singer-songwriter walking casually in Mount Royal Park in Montreal this past July when Perry, fresh off a breakup with actor Orlando Bloom, was in town for her Lifetimes Tour. Then, that same evening, came a shift in variation: the pair was photographed in the city’s swanky Le Violon restaurant. The tempo quickened. Were they friends? Was it a business dinner? Was Trudeau trying to get some guidance for his son Xavier’s rapping career?
In mid-October, the concerto reached its crescendo: photos of the couple locked in passionate embrace on a yacht in California surfaced online. A fortnight later came the finale fans were longing for: the pair walked out from a forty-first birthday dinner for Perry at the Crazy Horse in Paris—the “City of Love,” no less—hand-in-hand.
But the performance, however stirring, invites interpretation. Do all those public displays of affection actually signify love? Or is their coupling a case study in how celebrity, residual political stature, and cultural capital intersect? Trudeau, newly out of office, still carries the afterglow of executive authority. Perry embodies a different kind of reach, forged through global fame and affective intimacy with audiences—even as that stardom seems to be dipping.
It’s worth asking what draws public figures to one another when formal power fades but symbolic capital remains. Mutual curiosity? Strategic alignment? Or something more elemental: the proximity to lives that once shaped events and may yet do so again?
Of course, if you still believe it’s romance, you might want to stop reading now.
John Street taught politics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England (he’s now retired). His research examined the interplay between politics, media, and popular culture. When I asked him about TruPerry—as my editor and I have taken to calling the couple—Street invoked “the Kissinger effect,” named for the late United States secretary of state. The term was coined, in part, to capture Kissinger’s influence on foreign policy, but Street also extends it to his social life. Kissinger was no matinee idol, yet he was famously linked to a string of glamorous partners, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Shirley MacLaine, and Candice Bergen. Street argues political power exerts a powerful gravitational pull. It is, as Kissinger himself reportedly admitted, “the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
As far as looks go, Trudeau is clearly in a different league than the late Kissinger. But appearance, Street argues, only accounts for so much. The real appeal, in Street’s words, might be being near someone “who is, or has been, able to make things happen in the world.” Perry might be able sell out large arenas internationally, but very few private citizens can take their date to Tokyo to lunch with former Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida and his wife, Yuko.
Beyond the thrill of influence and access, Canadian-American psychology professor and relationship expert Wendy Walsh suggests a deeper motive could be at play: a need for attention, if mention relevancy. “Both of their careers are in a lull,” she adds. Perry’s recent chart activity has trended lower, with her latest album, released in 2024, labeled as “flat” and “lackluster” by critics. She also faced criticism for collaborating with producer Lukasz Gottwald—a.k.a. “Dr. Luke”—because of past allegations against him by singer Kesha, including sexual, physical, and verbal abuse allegations. And then, of course, her all-female space trip with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin was a bust online (the Guardian described the flight as the “utter defeat of American feminism,” as well as “indulgent and morally hollow”). Being with the former prime minister is breathing life back into her image. “Trudeau is definitely a high-value mate,” says Walsh.
Trudeau has himself long displayed a susceptibility to the limelight, an ease with visibility that shaped both his politics and his public persona. The ebbing of that attention now becomes part of this story. After a broken marriage and a string of no-confidence votes, he was pushed out of office in early 2025. “Having everybody always surrounding you and having your picture taken wherever you go, and then to suddenly have all that slow down” can require adjustment, says Walsh. Maybe he saw Perry as the perfect opportunity to shake things up.
The politician in him has to know Perry’s fame brings advantages. His early prime-ministerial brand, after all, was reinforced by sustained contact with pop culture: an appearance in the same COVID-19 lockdown fundraiser as Drake, a Vogue spread with former wife and broadcasting personality Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, and the frequent circulation within international celebrity spaces. Street says there’s always something to be gained for politicians to be seen in the presence of pop stars. “I think that’s particularly true now, where the attention given to politics is quite competitive with the different outlets that are available.”
Conventional politics is seen as a bit boring, especially if you’re a has-been, for lack of a better term. Coupling with a figure like Perry, who still ranks as one of the best-selling music artists in history, can bring “attention, sometimes even credibility, and possibly glamour, which is something politicians don’t have a great deal of,” Street says. Perhaps the cleanest modern case: Nicholas Sarkozy, former president of France, married Carla Bruni, a global supermodel and recording artist, in 2008. It’s also something advertisers have done throughout history—revive a waning product by placing it next to someone people admire.
Trudeau’s biographer, Stephen Maher (who has also contributed to The Walrus), echoes that sentiment. “You could imagine the romance was dreamed up by their respective publicists,” jokes Maher, whose book The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau was released in 2024. “It has kept them both in headlines around the world, which we have to assume is good for both their careers.”
But why would Trudeau even care now that active politics is behind him? Some have suggested his next phase will follow a familiar path for former world leaders: leveraging his name and office on the international speaking circuit. “I’m sure being seen with Katy Perry improves his market value,” assesses Street.
He might be profiting from what he’s learned from his “ladies’ man” father, the late Pierre Elliot Trudeau. The media-savvy senior Trudeau was perhaps the only other Canadian prime minister who felt at home with the Hollywood elite: he was close to the age the younger Trudeau is now when he was linked to a very popular singer-songwriter himself—the pop icon Barbra Streisand—as well as Sex in the City alumni Kim Cattrall. “His dad made the glamour work for his own political career and image, so why shouldn’t he?” asserts Walsh.
If the younger Trudeau is fated to morph into his father, then maybe dating Perry is also a matter of destiny. At least that’s one theory that can be drawn from the work of London, United Kingdom–based portrait painter, Suzi Malin. Malin’s eminent sitters have included musical artist Elton John, actor-comedian Peter Sellers, and Queen Anne-Marie of Greece. Her portrait of the late Prince Phillip hangs in King Charles’s palace.
For most of her adult life, Malin has observed and painted mostly men. She arranges to meet the spouse so that she can gain insight into the sitter’s choice of partner. She also studies photographs of the sitter’s parents, in particular their mother. She believes that this way, she can see how much of his experiences are inherited and how much is shaped by the man himself, his environment, and his choices. Sigmund Freud spoke about how attraction was often subconsciously advised by a person’s first bond with the opposite sex—the Oedipus complex, he called it. Malin believes this original relationship acts as a visual trigger in later years, colouring all romantic relationships.
After examining many couples for this link, she saw a striking likeness between their choice of mate and the first parental attachment they form—something Malin calls “prima copulism.” It’s an idea explored in her 2004 book Love at First Sight: Why You Love Who You Love in which she examined the relationship of fifty-five celebrity couples by dissecting their facial features.
This might all seem a bit on the pseudo-psychological side, but Malin’s analysis is compelling. She compares Mabel Anderson—King Charles’s childhood nanny—with Queen Camilla. Of course, the late Queen Elizabeth II was the King’s mother, but royal duty and tradition dictated that nannies care for and pretty much raise her children. An image from Malin’s book places a photo of Anderson pushing a carriage with the infant Charles side by side with a photo of a much younger Camilla Parker Bowles. The resemblance is uncanny.
I asked Malin to examine some images of Trudeau and Perry—and also of Margaret Trudeau around the age he was born. “I can see that Katy Perry had the same look as Justin Trudeau’s mother,” Malin responded to me in an email. “The shape at the base of the nose, the shape of the chin, the length of the forehead, and the short distance between nose and mouth. Note the gently curved shape of the upper lip and the wide mouth. There is also a similarity of expression to which could be described as demure or ‘ladylike.’ Justin’s attraction to Katy could be because he subconsciously recognized the look of his mother in the more curved shapes on Katy’s face.”
There are all kinds of emotional and sexual triggers that get formed early on in life, agrees Walsh. “It could be the tone of Perry’s voice, the way she walks, the colour of her hair—perhaps her looking like a younger, more modern version of Margaret Trudeau is a piece of it.” (Indeed, his mother was famously known to have hung out with heavyweights, like Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson, and Andy Warhol, at New York City’s illustrious Studio 54.)
When someone is attracted to another within this visual love category, the response is often instant, says Malin. “It’s passionate and sometimes rife with jealousy.” In mid-October, an anonymous source told People that Trudeau didn’t give up his pursuit of Perry despite her reluctance to date so soon after her breakup with Bloom. “He’s been pursuing her since their Montreal date,” the source told People. “He even flew to California to see her during a tour break” and continues to make a “big effort” to see her.
Does dating Perry—the so-called Queen of Camp and author of such bold and self-affirming lines as “You’re gonna hear me roar”—make him look less dignified? Is this a divorced dad having a mid-life crisis? Walsh has a response for that. “Are we supposed to meet somebody early on in life and stay with that one person for the rest of our lives? That’s a complete myth. It’s also become more and more the minority as our life expectancy gets extended. Even the most monogamous of people may have two or three long-term relationships. This is very typical.”
If it is something deeper, would the pair not want to protect the relationship, at least in the early, vulnerable stages, rather than be in places where they know there will be paparazzi and subsequent images of them plastered all over social media? “I think the circumstantial evidence would certainly support the case that this is a PR exercise or something in which true love is but a footnote, if anything,” Street agrees with a laugh.
To be fair, in a culture that rarely allows its former leaders to become ordinary people again, the relationship had no choice but to become a shared spectacle. On Halloween, Trudeau posted a picture of himself dressed as a shark almost identical to the costume from Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl halftime show where her backup dancer “Left Shark” became a viral sensation. Many saw the image as a not-so-subtle nod to their budding relationship. Some days later, Perry posted an image of herself on X posing in what looks to be a toy store. The post read “Is it a…?” The sentence is seemingly completed on her tank top with the word “Crush.” An inside joke flirtatiously directed at Trudeau, perhaps?
Of course, the couple might be just taking things day by day and just having fun, and it’s all playing out in real time in front of a fascinated audience. Whatever their relationship is, there will always be judgements, says Street. “We do the same with our family and friends, don’t we? We’ll say, ‘He’s not right for her, or she’s not right for him.’ It could be that they love each other, right?” An anonymous insider close to Perry recently told Elle that she’s “very happy” in the relationship, and apparently, the couple’s friends do think it’s a good match.
The duo has gone as far as hard-launching the relationship: on December 6, Perry posted a photo and video of herself with Trudeau on their Japan trip on Instagram. Rumour has it the pair rang in New Year’s Eve together. For the foreseeable future at least, whatever is unfolding, both parties seem to be all in.
The post The Strategic Love Story of Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry first appeared on The Walrus.
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