Kiernan Shipka may or may not be dating Christian Coppola, but she’s having a lot of fun watching us guess.
According to Shipka’s Instagram stories, she spent this past week in Rome at the Fendi fashion show. She hung out with fellow Netflix stars Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin of Stranger Things, but her followers were most curious about Coppola, the 26-year-old filmmaker holding Shipka’s hand in a Thursday post. Shipka captioned the photo with “MY LOVE.”
The comments flew in, and Shipka replied to several. “Are they dating?” someone asked, and she responded with just three kissy faces. Another fan just wrote, “He is your boyfriend,” and Kiernan dropped a cheeky fire emoji. Refinery29 has reached out to reps for Shipka and Coppola for comment.
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Although Coppola just made his debut on Shipka’s Instagram this week, a deep dive into his account shows that he and Shipka have been close since Shipka’s show, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, premiered back in October. On October 26, he praised the cast and crew (and Shipka in particular) in a heartfelt post. “Had the pleasure of visiting this beautiful set over the summer and am still in awe of how hard this girl works. Shadowing her during overnight shoots and watching how dedicated she is to bringing this character to life was both exhilarating and refreshing, and it inspired me to work harder myself,” he wrote, before calling Shipka “the most deserving actress out there who also happens to be one of the most kind and compassionate people I’ve ever come across.”
Shipka responded with a slew of heart emojis. “THIS IS MAKING ME CRY,” she wrote back. “I love you.”
So who is Coppola, exactly? Despite the name, he’s only a distant relative of the famed Coppola family. (“I’m not close enough to get invited to Thanksgiving dinner,” he previously told Variety. “I really see myself as my own entity.”) He’s directed three short films, one of which was an official Sabrina short for Netflix starring Shipka and her co-stars, Ross Lynch and Gavin Leatherwood. A look through his ‘gram shows he’s also close friends with the Sprouse brothers after directing Dylan in Daddy.