What If Rihanna and Leonardo DiCaprio Are Secretly the Star-Crossed Lovers of Our Time?
Picture the characters in our generation’s defining love story: No, they’re not a boat-necked Meghan Markle and uniformed Prince Harry, riding off into the English sunshine to the music of that adorable cellist. And they’re not Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande, matching finger tattoos standing in for the traditional exchange of locks of hair. They’re not even, in fictional terms, Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer dancing on a blacktop in 1980s Italy and sharing a mutual love of stone fruit. No—the star-crossed lovers of our time, our Romeo and Juliet, are Rihanna and Leonardo DiCaprio, who are not, in fact, in a relationship, nor has a relationship between them ever been confirmed. But one woman, writer Hunter Harris, is willing the universe to manifest this fantasy into reality, one tweet at a time.
Harris has been writing a kind of Internet fan fiction about Lihanna, or Rihcaprio, for more than a year now, prompting one of her colleagues at Vulture to refer to her as the site’s leading “DiCapriologist.” She has crafted an intricate tale via her Twitter account in which, after a brief romance, the two lovers are watching each other from afar, on very separate timelines, but always with the possibility that something will be rekindled. Essential to the project is that, in Harris’s estimation, Rihanna, for Leo, will always been the one who got away. “I just think it’s hilarious that this really powerful, popular guy cannot get Rihanna,” Harris says. “There is one thing out of his grasp. And her name is Robyn Rihanna Fenty.”
Fanfic is unfortunately all we have, based on rumors that date back to around 2015, when there were reports that Rihanna and Leo met at a party at the Playboy Mansion, where they might have kissed. That led to the unfounded notion that they have “been hooking up for years,” followed by a picture of the duo close-talking (possibly sensually whispering?) at Coachella in January 2016 (an event that Harris has called her “personal Christmas”). In February of this year, there were reports that Leo snuck into the after-party for Rihanna’s birthday fete through a side door. And in a scene in Ocean’s 8, Leo is mentioned while the cast is looking at a Met Gala seating chart, after which the camera cuts inexplicably to Rihanna—for Harris, this was QAnon-level confirmation from some kind of celebrity-gossip deep state, that yes, there is something between the two.
Part of what compels Harris is that though paparazzi photos of the actor and his younger swimsuit-model girlfriends tend to proliferate online, DiCaprio is actually rather mysterious and withholding regarding his personal life. “He’s so serious about acting,” she says. “I love the idea that he would go crazy over one text to Rihanna.” Part of Harris’s genius is to take some of the many pictures of DiCaprio on his phone (a subgenre is DiCaprio on his phone while riding a Citibike) and pair them with Rihanna news, as if the actor has a Google alert for his ex and uses any excuse to shoot her a DM. “I feel like if you scroll through Rihanna’s phone it would be like so many of those white bubbles on the left side, you know? She just hasn’t replied to any of his text messages but he keeps trying and he won’t let go.”
It’s also fun to imagine that DiCaprio’s much-documented penchant for younger women is filling some kind of void that his pining for Rihanna, a world-conquering businesswoman much closer to his age, has left in his adult-fuccboi heart. That while Summer Leo is playing beach volleyball in Malibu or sunning himself on a yacht with his 21-year-old girlfriend, Camila Morrone, he can’t help but keep tabs on Rihanna, who’s off celebrating new makeup and lingerie lines and new movies. Harris has even imagined that DiCaprio’s notorious adult male friend group, the Pussy Posse, plays a role. “There’s a Pussy Posse group text” whenever something about Rihanna is in the press, because they know that their bro is immediately going to message her, she says, “and then there’s a side group without Leo, where the boys are like, ‘Please don’t show him this, let’s wait.’ His friends are trying to be supportive but they’re like, ‘She’s Rihanna, nothing’s going to happen.’ ” Harris even has an answer for how DiCaprio can stalk Rihanna on Instagram—he obviously has a finsta (or fake Instagram): “If he’s dating 20-year-olds, he definitely has a finsta.”
As for the Fenty side of the matter, Harris was even convinced that Rihanna’s role in Valerian was a flirtatious nod to Leo, since she was acting opposite from DiCaprio look-alike Dane DeHaan. “She was flirting back,” she says, but in Rihanna fashion, “with big-budget productions.” It’s a level of detail that only someone who spends her life online, which Harris does as an associate editor at Vulture, could aspire to. She’s been approached to write a Leo and Rihanna coffee-table book: “I’m honestly surprised that people are so taken with it,” she says. It could be that it’s incredibly refreshing, now that some celebrity relationships are chronicled entirely online, to imagine everything we don’t know behind the scenes. Harris does worry sometimes that one tweet will turn into “the one thing that’s too accurate. I worry that one day I’ll get an email from [DiCaprio’s] rep that's like, subject line: Leo, body text: Please stop.”
But, for now, she hopes that one day Leo will “shoot his shot,” she’s happy to say. “If only the most important love story of my time could be consummated, just once,” she says—“but it would, like, break my mind.” (In a world where a Sex and the City Instagram fan account presaged Cynthia Nixon’s run for governor of New York, anything can happen.) In a follow-up email to Vogue, she said that she’d “also just like to reiterate that these tweets are extremely dumb and also that Anti was the best album of 2016.”
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