In just about every photo of Meryl Streep and Martin Short together, one or both of them are smiling. Not just polite smiles, tacit acceptances of paparazzi attention, but broad, knowing smiles, teeth visible, eyes crinkling. Maybe he’s telling her about a new Jiminy Glick segment, but that’s not exactly what it looks like. There’s something going on with these two — something they know and we don’t. Or we do: like, how good are two actors, really, at faking an attraction? Even one who is arguably the greatest living actor? So either they’re dating, maybe in secret, or they’re just having a laugh at all our expenses. They’re even smiling in the photo that Steve Martin posted on Instagram of the three of them with a giant NO symbol of his own face.
Their romance — or fauxmance — began earlier this year at the Golden Globes, where the two showed up holding hands and whispering to each other. Flirting? Maybe. Was this what Selena Gomez was telling Taylor Swift about? I kind of believe it. Part of what seems so thrilling about Streep and Short’s nearly year-long kinda-flirtation is that, contrary to what tweets may have you believe, this isn’t really the stuff of Nancy Meyers movies. Meyers’s films, as decadent and romantic as they often are, have a plain-stated, brightly lit, wholesome sensibility. Her characters say what they mean and how they feel — even if they’re not saying it directly to each other. There’s a frantic, nervous energy to the standard Meyers female romantic lead, whether it’s Cameron Diaz’s ditzy trailer editor in The Holiday or Diane Keaton’s overemotional playwright in Something’s Gotta Give. Meyers’s men have a kind of chaotic caddishness: They are embodied by Mel Gibson, Jack Nicholson, and Alec Baldwin (and yes, Steve Martin — but he was the geeky love interest in It’s Complicated, not the cool one). Instead, there’s a classic Hollywood appeal to their whole deal: “The less said, the better,†and so on.
A gentle attraction between Streep and Short didn’t seem all that out of place when rumors first swirled; the two had just come off of an onscreen romance in the third season of Only Murders in the Building and had been friends for years. That Streep was recently single added, perhaps, to the intrigue, but only at first. Not long after the Globes, Short clarified to Bill Maher — of all people — that the two were just friends. (If you’re going to come out as in a new relationship, “Club Random†is not the place where that’s going to happen.) The rumors would have been otherwise easy to put to bed if Streep and Short didn’t continue to show up together again (to various Hollywood functions), and again (to Giorgi Baldi), and again (to the Only Murders in the Building season-four premiere — okay, maybe that one is too easy).
Their whole playbook looks far more like that of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce or Sabrina Carpenter and Barry Keoghan than it does the natural lighting of the Book Club franchise. By creating an air of vague mystery, Streep and Short have piqued all interest around them. They seem cool. There they are having dinner; there they are holding hands at a Broadway show. They’ve been able to completely dictate the terms of whatever is happening (if anything is happening!). Their continued denials and repeated appearances appeal not so much to their otherwise-targeted age demographics; they are not playing to their contemporaries but to a DeuxMoi generation who read and absorb celebrity gossip. In an age in which we have access to so many celebrities all the time, Streep and Short, by posting their own versions of paparazzi pictures and controlling their own image with their own iPhones, have managed to do something old-fashioned in making the tabloids work for them.
Only Murders in the Building set out to bridge demographic interests with two veteran comedic actors (Short and Martin) and Selena Gomez, a woman who was at one point in time the most-followed person on Instagram (she’s now third overall, but the most-followed woman). Even with Gomez’s popularity and comedic bona fides, the fact that the real story of the show has turned into an IRL will-they-or-won’t-they with Streep and Short packs a pleasant surprise. What is more youthful, for instance, than a situationship with a longtime friend turned co-worker turned something? This is the stuff of fanfiction, Wattpad-type nonsense for the computer-solitaire generation. But above all else, it’s really fun. Short is one of the funniest living talents, a live wire replete with jokes and voices and faces, and Streep’s eternal elegance and poise and occasional humor have made her the most in-demand actress of the past 50 years. We love to see them — and we love to see how much they like to see each other.