The clip ran a few seconds. Hugh Jackman stood outside Arthur Ashe Stadium with both arms around Anna Wintour, the two of them laughing before the tennis started. Page Six posted it on September 5 last year. The pairing looked unlikely on its face: the Wolverine actor and the woman who led American Vogue for 37 years.
Anyone who knows them wasn’t surprised. The two have been turning up in the same places for years, and the friendship reaches back well before any of it played out in front of a camera.
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How Jackman and Wintour became friends
They are friends, and have been for more than ten years. The relationship sits where New York theatre, film and fashion overlap, held together by a shared love of tennis and a creative trust that predates most of their public sightings. There has never been a romance between them, despite the speculation that tends to follow any photo of two famous single people standing close.
Jackman is 57 and has built his career across film and the stage in equal measure. Wintour, 76, now oversees editorial content across Condรฉ Nast as its global chief content officer. The two move in the same circles, and one of those circles forms around a tennis court.
A familiar sight at the US Open
That September afternoon, the pair sat together for the men’s singles semifinal between Felix Auger-Aliassime and Jannik Sinner at the 2025 US Open. Sinner won and reached the final, where Carlos Alcaraz beat him two days later. Julianne Moore, Anna Kendrick and Adam Driver were among the others in the crowd.
The tournament has long been common ground. A Getty photograph from 2015 shows the two seated together at the Federer versus Djokovic final, and both were back in the stands in 2022. Wintour is a committed tennis fan who plans part of her year around the sport. Roger Federer has said she used to skip fashion shows to come and watch him play.
The Soho House meeting that explains the friendship
The detail that says the most about these two never made the news at the time.
In her 2022 biography of Wintour, the journalist Amy Odell, who interviewed more than 250 people for the book, described Jackman bringing his most personal project to her before it was made. Ahead of production on The Greatest Showman in the mid-2010s, he sat down with a group of Vogue editors at Soho House and asked them what they thought of the film. The studio had already committed the money. Jackman wanted Wintour’s read on whether audiences would take to a P.T. Barnum musical scored with modern pop songs.
He is not the only one to approach her like this. Odell reported that Bradley Cooper sent Wintour the script for A Star Is Born and asked her view on casting before he went to Lady Gaga. Serena Williams has credited Wintour’s advice with helping her win Wimbledon. Wintour also advised Hillary Clinton on her wardrobe during the White House years.
None of them needed her money or her contacts. What they wanted was a straight opinion from someone who has spent a career working out what the public will take to and what it will reject. That quieter role, as a private sounding board for some of the biggest names in film and sport, seldom shows up in print.
More than a courtside hello
The warmth runs both ways, in small and specific ways.
In August 2024, Jackman shared the cover of Vogue’s September issue, the year’s biggest, with Blake Lively. Baz Luhrmann shot it as a Hitchcock-style short film. Jackman wrote on Instagram that a call to do a Vogue shoot was the kind of thing you accept without a second thought.
In June 2025, Wintour and her Vogue team sent him a custom cake to mark two shows he had running at once: the play Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes at the Minetta Lane Theatre, and his Radio City Music Hall concert run, Hugh Jackman Live from New York with Love. He posted it to his Instagram Stories. People do not send cakes to acquaintances they are merely tolerating.
A big year for both
Both of them are in the middle of major change, which is part of why the friendship keeps coming up now.
Wintour announced in June 2025 that she would leave the editor-in-chief job at American Vogue after 37 years. That September she named her protรฉgรฉ Chloe Malle to run the US edition, and she kept her senior position at Condรฉ Nast. Soon after, The Devil Wears Prada 2 reached cinemas on May 1, 2026, with a home release due later in June. The sequel follows a powerful editor whose authority slips as the magazine business contracts around her, a plot that tracks closely with Wintour’s own departure.
Wintour got involved with the film herself. She visited the set, told the director David Frankel that the flowers in a Dior scene were wrong, and watched him change them. She filmed a cameo that was cut after the shot came out blurry, and Frankel decided against asking her for another take. She also posed in Prada beside Meryl Streep, who plays the character modelled on her, for the May 2026 cover of Vogue.
Jackman has been remaking his own life over the same stretch. His 27-year marriage to Deborra-Lee Furness ended in divorce in 2025, the year he also stepped out publicly with his Music Man co-star Sutton Foster. He has moved away from Wolverine and toward the stage, with Broadway and concert work filling most of his schedule. The two friends landed in the same room again on May 4, when Jackman attended the 2026 Met Gala that Wintour co-chaired.
The side of Wintour her friends see
In public, Wintour is dark glasses and a fixed expression, shadowed for twenty years by Miranda Priestly, the character Meryl Streep modelled partly on her. The Wintour that Jackman knows is the one who sent a cake to mark his two New York shows and sat beside him through an afternoon at the US Open.
He seems to have worked out the difference early, back at that Soho House table, where he came looking for an honest read on his film and got one. Years on, little about the friendship has changed. It still happens mostly where the cameras are not.
