Jessica Simpson’s game-changing 2020 memoir Open Book was so vivid that, when it wasn’t, it was legitimately disappointing. Case in point: When she discusses her post-split life with Nick Lachey, she writes that around February 2006, “I was free to date and explore the way Jane Goodall studied the mating habits of Hollywood’s celebrity bachelors. I met guys at clubs, or at their People would call me my people. Our shared fame meant we couldn’t be seen together, or we’d end up in the sausage grinder of the tabloid fame machine. We rented cars or met on private planes, maybe borrowed or hired to impress me, who knows. It’s intensely glamorous. And everything was completely secret. I practically cried reading this part of a book I otherwise loved. Tell me the stories. I want to know how these famous guys smelled and what their dicks were like. Why gloss over something that could make several books of material?
The answer to that question seemed a little clearer Wednesday, when Simpson dropped “Movie Star,” an “Amazon Original Story,” which, according to marketing copy, is “a short and true story about a world-famous actor and fictional Hollywood. Romance gone wrong by Jessica Simpson.” The 28-page history is largely set in 2006. OK, OK. She’s back to let us know what life was like among eligible bachelors. Why not make it into a series of short and true stories to entertain us for years to come?
A “movie star” describes an affair with “a huge movie star” that Simpson meets near the red carpet at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards (she calls them the “MTV Awards,” but reports the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. days later, and the VMAs that year occurred on September 6). “As our mutual friend, my bodyguard, talked, this megastar, who I grew up thinking was so hot, eyed me up and down,” Simpson writes. “Like he was undressing me with his eyes, which was good, because I had plenty of reasons to leave that dress and change.” She ran into him again at the gym soon after, she writes, but after 9/11 she was reunited with Lachey (and then they talked their whole Newlyweds reality show), it would be years before anything really happened with this “movie star.” “
And what happened… wasn’t much. They huddled and kissed: “We’ll find a quiet place to talk. We kissed sometimes, and I felt the same rush each time. But mostly we just talked. ” She found out very soon after the reunion that he had a girlfriend, seeing them together on the red carpet, but when confronted, he told her: “It’s totally over. She’s actually moving out, but—look, if I’m in her place If not, that’s a story we have to deal with. All people get that. I swear, we’re not together. You’re the one girl I want to be with. You’re the one.”
He became frustrated with her when he refused to have sex with her by flying her to a hotel near the set of the movie he was shooting. “We hadn’t had sex, and he had a temper tantrum,” she writes. “But it didn’t matter – I knew it was all coming to an end. I didn’t care if he came into my teenage fantasy life, it wasn’t a choice that the same girl, my younger self, would be proud of. And that’s about it. A kind of unexpected story. , indeed. And yet, interesting. Who was that boy?
If Simpson didn’t intend to send the Internet into a frenzy of speculation, well, that’s what she did. One of the best clues he ever gave to his movie star identity was that he wore jeans and a t-shirt to the 2001 VMAs. A diligent observer at ONTD pointed out:
Guys in jeans and t-shirts: Kid Rock, Johnny Knoxville, Mark Wahlberg, The Edge (lmao), Moby (lmao again), Will Smith (he had a jacket over a white t-shirt), even Jay-Z donned a white tee for the red carpet ( (This would be a hell of a revelation.)
Jamie Foxx and Ben Stiller had button downs, Will Ferrell was in a 70s-looking shirt, Usher was wearing hideous leather pants rather than jeans.
I went through Getty to look at all the red carpet pictures (which may be an imperfect representation of the stars out there that night, but still), and no doubt, some of the members of 112 and O-Town, Busta Rhymes, Justin Timberlake, Bon Jovi’s Richie Sambora , Ja Rule , maybe Pauly Shore , and maybe even Carrot Top wore jeans and t-shirts that year (sometimes with a jacket—so smart!—on top). None of them were movie stars then. (Also, Knoxville appeared to be wearing Dickies or some other type of baggy chinos, not jeans.) It seems that Smith and Wahlberg were the only two people who could be identified as movie stars at the time, and Smith was married. Time, which means Simpson never referred to Jada Pinkett Smith as his “girlfriend.” That leaves Wahlberg, who began dating Rhea Durham in 2001 and eventually married her in 2009.
Another clue that suggests things to Wahlberg: “We had different beliefs, but the same reverence for God,” writes Simpson. Simpson’s father Joe Simpson was a Baptist minister; Wahlberg is notoriously Catholic. How it’s played:
“You know how much I want to have sex with you.” Oh my god, I thought. He continued, “And how it makes me want to repent.”
Kind of fun. Anyway, I’m not saying it’s definitely Mark Wahlberg, but I’m definitely not saying that. And neither is The Simpsons.