Elsa Pataky’s birthday is on July 18. She’s been on holiday with Chris Hemsworth and their close friends Matt and Luciana Damon in Ibiza. There’s a whole crew of friends who have joined. Here they all are on the beach celebrating together. It’s not a small group. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A post shared by Elsa Pataky (@elsapatakyconfidential) on

I always wonder about this where celebrities are concerned. Chris and Matt are the most famous in this crowd so you presume they’re also the wealthiest. Or maybe they’re not? Maybe everyone in these shots is super rich? Because to go on holiday with friends, especially with friends who are celebrities, there’s a baseline logistics consensus, right? The Hemsworths and the Damons aren’t staying at 3-star or even 4-star accommodations. So how does this work? Do the celebrities pay for the friends who are on 3-star budgets? 

Back to birthdays and milestones – Elsa is turning 43 years old and next year, she and Chris will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. They got married in 2010, he was 27 years old at the time. Thor came out the year later so this was well before he is who he is now, and even after the first Thor, I don’t know that he was a household name. I remember writing this about him when he was named PEOPLE’s Sexiest Man Alive, that he hadn’t yet reached critical mass. But this is also how Chris has avoided the messy. His rise wasn’t accessorised by romantic gossip through those critical years, his late 20s and early 30s which, for movie stars of his mold, the strapping hunk type, is rare. How many movie stars can you think of who have had love lives that don’t make the front page? His buddy Matt Damon certainly made the front page for many years. There was his relationship with Minnie Driver (the story, remember, was that he broke up with her on Oprah) and then Winona Ryder, at the time one of the most famous women in Hollywood. After they broke up, he declared that he would only ever date “civilians” from then on. Now he and Luciana are approaching their 15th anniversary next.  

When it’s time, then, to do a study on Chris Hemsworth and his career, it would remiss to not mention how the lack of romantic gossip has factored into it. This is a business of image and image-making. As much as they say it’s about the work, like it or not, the work is affected and influenced by so much more than just the work.