Do PR Relationships Really Exist?

Actress and comedian Mary Beth Barone made a joke this week about being handed the chef from Emily in Paris, Lucas Bravo, like a consolation prize after her marketing budget request for her brilliant special Galaxy Brain got turned down.

On Late Night with Seth Meyers in late July, she described Netflix telling her they could set her up in a PR relationship instead of a bigger promo budget, with their first date court side at a Knicks game back in March.

It's funny because everyone in the industry recognized exactly what she was talking about, and because the two of them had already been seen together for real. Bravo and Barone were spotted together during Cannes Film Festival festivities at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, with video showing him affectionately rubbing her back as they stood close together chatting, and the pair were also photographed on a night out in Cannes.

People ran it as its own story, saying they sparked “romance rumors”, and Barone's deadpan bit only made it harder to tell where the joke ended and the real hangouts began. It's the idea that stars date to raise their profile, that two famous people together become more famous than the sum of their parts, and it's one of those theories that refuses to die because it is, occasionally, true.

Hollywood publicist Jack Ketsoyan even went on record about it back in 2019, sitting down on an Australian podcast and explaining, plainly, how the machinery works.

Ketsoyan described what the industry calls “showmances”, romances engineered for hype rather than affection. Sometimes the goal was selling an album or a concert. Sometimes it was burying a bad opening weekend under a more interesting headline. He walked through one deal in detail: a male client with a movie taking on water in reviews, paired with a woman willing to sign on for a year, public appearances and photo ops scheduled in advance, both sides walking away clean once the press tour wrapped, no hard feelings, no extension.

He was candid about the trade at the center of it too, that the woman in these arrangements typically goes from the bottom of the call sheet to leading lady practically overnight.

After nearly three decades in celebrity journalism, I am skeptical of the showmance as most people imagine it. I am close to celebrities and their publicists, and it does not happen nearly as often as the conspiracy minded corners of fandom believe. Calling these arrangements fake misses what is actually going on. People behind the scenes do introduce two clients to each other because they know it will raise both profiles and build something that benefits everyone involved.

But the relationship itself, the actual time spent together, is not fabricated in the way people assume. Nobody is handing over a script. It is closer to a very well informed setup than a performance, the kind of introduction any good friend might make, except this friend also happens to know exactly how good it will look for both of their careers.

A fake relationship implies two people pretending to feel something they don't. What actually tends to happen is two real people meeting because someone in a position to know saw the advantage first, and then choosing, for their own reasons, to let it play out. Which in a sense is not so different from dating in the real world.

You are looking for someone who benefits you, who makes you feel safe, happy and secure. These situations are not a lie so much as a very calculated matchmaking service, dressed up afterward as fate, or in Mary Beth Barone's case, dressed up afterward as a bit.

The one pairing in recent times I believe, without reservation after falling for it as real, was engineered for the press tour rather than born out of it, is Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson, who dated from roughly July 2025 to December 2025. They met filming The Naked Gun reboot in spring 2024, and by the time the press tour kicked off that July, the chemistry looked less like acting than something the world desperately wanted to be real. Anderson confirmed in December that they had briefly dated after wrapping the film, and by then it was already over, filed under friends.

The truth sits somewhere uncomfortable in the middle. There does seem to have been real feeling and a real connection between them. But it never got the chance to be properly explored on its own terms. It got swept up in a press cycle instead, PDA scheduled around premieres, a Today show bit where they pretended to be caught making out, all of it doing double duty as promotion for a movie that needed the noise.

Whatever was actually there between two people who clearly liked each other got used by the press cycle around them, rather than given room to become something on its own.

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