Hailee Steinfeld covers PEOPLE

I was surprised to see Hailee Steinfeld on the cover of PEOPLE this week, and with a new photo shoot too. Not because Hailee Steinfeld isn’t a star but because …well… it’s PEOPLE, and she could easily be on the cover of any fashion magazine, and PEOPLE isn’t exactly her demo. 

But that’s the demo PEOPLE wants, so she’s on the digital cover which makes more sense when you consider who the magazine is trying to target. 

Hailee is currently promoting Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the follow-up to the 2018 smash-hit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. She is playing Gwen Stacy/Spider-Woman aka Spider-Gwen, which is very confusing to me because she is also Kate Bishop in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and while I know one is animated and the other is live-action… STILL. Won’t the children be confused? Actually, probably not. Children are much better equipped to understand everything in the world right now. 

As for the PEOPLE cover story, it’s really not that much of a story because celebrities don’t often get real deep with PEOPLE, that’s part of the deal. But also because Hailee Steinfeld, who was a child actor and is now a star in adulthood, has been able to stay relatively undercover. She’s now 26 years old (if this surprised you… me too!) but we hear almost nothing about her personal life. I can’t, off the top of my head, name anyone she’s dated. Her romances have never been part of her public narrative. Really the only non-work extracurricular she’s best known for is being friends with Taylor Swift and featured in the video for "Bad Blood". 

All I do know, and this is mostly from our site manager, Emily, is that lesbians are obsessed with her, and not just because of her performance in Dickinson but in so many of her performances. Kate Bishop was also called a “gay icon in the making” when Hawkeye came out. So the gays will probably be all over Hailee in this red outfit today making the talk show rounds to promote the movie. I’m never a fan of a flare leg pant but the monochrome here kinda takes away from that detail and I do love the length of that blazer and the floral high collar so overall, indeed, this is a win.