Austin Butler Addresses Emily Ratajkowski Dating Rumors After Being Spotted Together in NYC

Yes, Austin Butler has seen rumors linking him to Emily Ratajkowski — and he’s not afraid to address them

“The true answer is that I have a lot of friends, and we’re friends and we had dinner, and that we’re friends,” Butler, 34, said of his relationship with Ratajkowski, also 34, during an interview with Vanity Fair published on Tuesday, November 18.

Rumors swirled that Butler and Ratajkowski were dating when the pair were spotted in September having dinner together in New York City. In photos shared by DeuxMoi at the time, the twosome sat side-by-side while at a booth inside the restaurant Waverly Inn.

For Butler, eyes on his private life felt like too much — “I just wanted to hide,” he said — but he has since changed his outlook.

“I’m going to live a constricted small life because I’m afraid of what other people are going to say or what they’re going to think?” he noted.

While it’s unclear how the duo know each other, the pair have shared an acting credit — Butler appeared on a 2007 episode of iCarly, while Ratajkowski made a cameo two years later.

“I was on, like, three episodes,” Ratajkowski recalled of her role during an Elle UK interview published in August. “They are, kind of, fun. It was crazy [being on] Nickelodeon. It was my breakout role, I guess.”

She continued, “It was just a crazy experience being with a bunch of child actors, like, famously. … I was in public high school, so it was a real experience to all of sudden meet people my age who had grown up on set.”

Butler was last publicly linked to girlfriend Kaia Gerber, but the pair called it quits in January after three years of dating.

The exes were first linked in December 2021 when Butler and Gerber, now 24, were spotted attending a yoga class together. Us Weekly confirmed at the time that the twosome were “low-key dating” after Butler and Gerber split from Vanessa Hudgens and Jacob Elordi, respectively. (Butler dated Hudgens for nine years before the pair split in 2020.)

Ratajkowski, meanwhile, has been in several high-profile relationships including Brad Pitt, Pete Davidson and more after her 2022 split from husband Sebastian Bear-McClard. (Ratajkowski and Bear-McClard had been married for four years before their divorce.)

“I can tell you that I have never been single before,” she told Harper’s Bazaar at the time. “I feel all the emotions. I feel anger, sadness. I feel excitement. I feel joy. I feel levity. Every day is different. The only good thing I know is that I’m feeling all those things, which is nice because it makes me believe that I’ll be OK.”

While reflecting on her private life, Ratajkowski shared that she has a new approach to finding The One.

“To use the TikTok phrase, I was a bit of a ‘pick-me girl’ in the sense that I wasn’t very good at deciding what I liked,” she said. “I really wanted to be chosen. It was hard for me to go on a date with someone and think about how much I did or didn’t like them. I would have been thinking about how they were perceiving me, what it meant, what they wanted from me, what it meant about my self-worth.”

She continued, “I don’t have that anymore. So now it’s really fun to go to dinner with someone and be like, ‘Cool. I really enjoyed these parts of them. I really didn’t like these other parts.’”