Katy Perry on her relationship with Justin Trudeau: "The missing piece of the puzzle finally appeared"
Katy Perry has spoken at greater length and more directly for the first time about her relationship with former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, describing a relationship that began during one of the most emotionally demanding periods of her private and professional life. In an interview with People, published on September 2, 2026, the American singer said that she met Trudeau during the Lifetimes tour and that after that encounter her view of her own life changed noticeably. Speaking about her long-standing desire for a partnership that she would experience as complete and lasting, Perry explained that in therapy she often mentioned the need for an "epic, legendary love." Despite her success, family and career, she felt, as she put it, that there was a "missing piece of the puzzle" in her life. She now associates that metaphor with Trudeau, whom she had already publicly called the "love of my life."
In the same conversation, Perry also showed a list of personal wishes that she had compiled in August 2025, shortly after she and Trudeau first appeared together in public. The final, tenth item on that list simply read "True Love." The singer now says she believes that this is exactly what describes the relationship she is in. Her statements come more than a year after the first photographs and reports of the two going out together in Montreal and after a period in which she and Trudeau gradually stopped hiding their closeness. Nearly eleven months passed from the first speculation about their relationship to their joint appearance on the red carpet, and Perry now speaks about the relationship without reservation.
The relationship began during a very difficult tour
According to the interview Perry gave to People, her meeting with Trudeau happened at a time when she was simultaneously going through her breakup with Orlando Bloom and an exhausting world tour. Representatives for Perry and Bloom confirmed in July 2025 that during the previous months they had been changing the nature of their relationship and focusing on co-parenting. In a statement carried at the time by ABC News, they emphasized that their shared priority was raising their daughter Daisy Dove "with love, stability and mutual respect." Perry and Bloom had been together, apart from one earlier breakup, for almost a decade, became engaged in 2019, and Daisy was born in August 2020.
Perry has now described that transition as one of the most difficult periods she has experienced. She said that when news of the breakup became public, she was in Australia, far from friends and caught in a schedule of almost constant performances. According to her, she felt lonely, cried, and had the sense that she was physically and emotionally distant from the people who normally supported her. At the same time, she had to continue performing demanding concerts and maintain a professional pace in front of tens of thousands of people. People states that the Lifetimes tour began in April 2025 and included 91 performances across five continents, which further illustrates how intense the period was in which her private life was changing.
The singer, however, does not talk about her previous relationship as something she wants to erase or invalidate. In the interview, she emphasized that she would not have stayed in a relationship for nine years if it had not contained important experiences and lessons. She described every relationship as a kind of teacher, and linked the decision to break up with the need to let go of the past so that she could move forward. The way she speaks about Bloom is consistent with the public position their representatives expressed after the breakup: the romantic relationship ended, but their cooperation as parents remains a permanent commitment. In the new interview, Perry therefore focuses more on what happened after the breakup than on the reasons why the previous relationship ended.
First meetings in Montreal sparked speculation
The first more concrete information about Perry and Trudeau emerged in late July 2025. The Canadian Press reported at the time that they had dinner together at the Le Violon restaurant in Montreal while Perry was in Canada as part of her tour. Restaurant representative Samantha Jin confirmed that they spent about two hours there and mostly kept to themselves. According to her description, they behaved discreetly and politely, spoke with the staff, and thanked the kitchen team before leaving. At that point, the staff did not notice any public displays of affection, so the outing itself was not confirmation of a romantic relationship, but it immediately sparked media speculation.
Two days later, Trudeau was seen at Perry's concert in Montreal, according to reports later summarized by People. The singer now says that she met him precisely during the tour and that afterward things "shifted." That wording matches the development of the relationship that the public was able to follow over the following months: initial discretion gradually gave way to increasingly frequent appearances together. In October 2025, the couple was photographed holding hands in Paris, where they went out to celebrate Perry's 41st birthday. Global News and other Canadian media outlets described that outing at the time as their first clear public appearance as a couple.
For Trudeau, this was also a period following a major life change. He and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau announced their separation in August 2023 after 18 years of marriage and have three children. Trudeau then announced in January 2025 that he would step down as leader of the Liberal Party and as prime minister after a successor was chosen, and his term at the head of the Canadian government ended on March 14, 2025, when Mark Carney was sworn in as the new prime minister. At the time of his first meetings with Perry in Montreal, Trudeau was therefore no longer the head of the Canadian government, which is important context in reporting on their relationship. The official website of the Prime Minister of Canada confirms that Carney was sworn in precisely on March 14, 2025.
"True Love" as the final item on the list
One of the most striking parts of Perry's new interview concerns her habit of writing down goals and wishes. People states that in August 2025 she made a list on which the tenth and final item was "True Love." During a video call with the journalist, she took the paper out of her phone case and showed it to the camera, linking the wish she had written down at the time with her current relationship. Perry has spoken publicly for years about therapy, personal development and various techniques she uses to try to structure her wishes and decisions, but in this case she particularly emphasized the symbolism of the fact that Trudeau appeared precisely during a period when she was closing one major chapter of her life.
In the conversation, she also recalled telling her therapist that she wanted an "epic, legendary love." She explained that much in her life had already been big, unusual or intense, but that the partnership dimension in particular felt like the part that had not yet fallen into place. When she says that the "missing piece of the puzzle appeared," Perry is not speaking only about the beginning of a new romance, but about the feeling that her private life has finally aligned with what she had long wanted. Such statements belong to her personal interpretation of the relationship and do not represent claims that can be independently measured, but they clearly show how seriously she herself views the relationship.
Perry used a similar tone in June 2026, when she and Trudeau attended the Tribeca Festival in New York together. At the world premiere of the concert film "Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour - Live from Paris," the singer publicly called him the "love of my life" and said that she feels grounded with him. Tribeca officially confirmed that the film's premiere was held on June 8, 2026, with a conversation with Perry after the screening. The festival describes the film as a feature-length record of the tour, filmed in Paris in November 2025 with dozens of cameras positioned around a large arena production. The film has also become a framework in which Perry has spoken increasingly openly in recent months about the emotional cost of the tour and the changes that accompanied it.
Trudeau as a constant source of support at concerts
Perry particularly emphasizes Trudeau's presence at her performances. According to People, the former Canadian prime minister was in the audience at ten of her twenty recent summer concerts. The singer says that he knows the lyrics to her songs, follows what she does and shows a genuine interest in her work. She described that kind of support as emotionally healing, especially after a period in which she had to cope with a breakup, criticism and the physical strain of a long tour. For Perry, this is clearly not a minor detail of the relationship, but one of the reasons she experiences Trudeau's behavior as stabilizing.
She also described him as a person strongly focused on emotions and relationships and said that they recognize themselves in each other in that respect. In her presentation of the relationship, the emphasis is therefore not on Trudeau's former political position, but on his behavior in private life. That is also one of the reasons why their relationship attracts so much interest: it is an unexpected pairing of one of the most recognizable pop stars of her generation and a politician who led Canada for almost ten years. Nevertheless, in the latest conversation Perry tries to describe the relationship primarily as an intimate partnership, without political interpretation or public strategy.
Trudeau, for his part, has spoken about the relationship much more reservedly in public, although during their appearances together he has clearly shown support for Perry. Their outing in Paris in October 2025 was the first visible confirmation of the relationship without an official statement, while their arrival on the red carpet at the Tribeca Festival in June 2026 marked a new phase in how public their relationship had become. Since then, they have also appeared together on more private trips and at music events, but Perry is now for the first time linking the beginning of the relationship in greater detail with her own therapeutic process, the breakup of her previous relationship and the feeling that her life fell back into place after a difficult period.
The tour as a turning point in her private and professional life
Perry places the entire story in the broader context of the Lifetimes tour, which, according to her own words, simultaneously brought her exhaustion and a sense of returning to her purpose. On stage, she continued performing production-intensive shows even at moments when she privately felt very vulnerable. In interviews related to the concert film in recent weeks, she has spoken about the resilience she had to develop, but also about how renewed direct contact with the audience played an important role in helping her emerge from that difficult period. People stated at the beginning of September that this was her first major tour in seven years, which further increased the professional pressure.
The concert film "Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour - Live from Paris" arrived in cinemas and IMAX on September 2, 2026, in limited distribution, just as the new interview was published. Tribeca states that the film runs for 119 minutes and was directed by Paul Dugdale, known for concert productions featuring major musical artists. For Perry, the film project became a kind of document of a period in which professional challenges, the end of a long-term partnership and the beginning of a new relationship overlapped. That is why, when talking about Trudeau, she almost constantly returns to the tour: it was while on the road, in the midst of work that was exhausting her, that she met the man she now describes as the most important new chapter of her private life.
At the same time, Perry does not claim that the difficult period simply disappeared after the relationship began. On the contrary, her statements show that she sees the past year as a series of interconnected experiences: the breakup required letting go of what was no longer working, the tour forced her to keep working despite the emotional burden, and the new relationship appeared at a time when she was trying to redefine what she wanted next. This allows her to present the story about Trudeau as a continuation of a personal process, rather than merely as an unexpected celebrity romance. In that framework, the sentence about the "missing piece of the puzzle" becomes a summary of the way she herself interprets the changes from the summer of 2025 to September 2026.
What Perry now says about the next period
After the main part of the tour ended and the concert film was released, Perry says she wants more room for everyday life, family and experiences from which new music will emerge. She briefly explained to People that she is now "living my life" so that she can write about it afterward. That statement suggests that she does not want to immediately turn every personal event into a public narrative or a new campaign, although it is clear that the experiences of the past year will probably influence her future songwriting. In June 2026, she released the single "Watch It Burn," which numerous media outlets linked to the collapse of her previous relationship, but in the new interview Perry gives much more space to the present than to publicly dissecting the past.
For now, there have been no official announcements about marriage or other formal steps in her relationship with Trudeau, so any such speculation would be premature. What has been confirmed is that since July 2025 they have gone from a discreet dinner in Montreal to a public partnership, joint appearances and very direct statements by Perry about love and support. The singer now speaks of the relationship as something that helped her stabilize emotionally after a demanding year, and she cites Trudeau's presence at her concerts as a concrete example of that support. Their relationship, which at first seemed like an unexpected combination of two very different public worlds, has thus become an integral part of the story of her new period in life.
Sources:
- People - interview with Katy Perry about her relationship with Justin Trudeau, therapy, the tour, her wish list and the support Trudeau gives her (link)
- The Canadian Press / CityNews - confirmation of Perry and Trudeau's dinner together at the Le Violon restaurant in Montreal in July 2025 (link)
- ABC News - statement from Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom's representatives about their breakup and co-parenting (link)
- Office of the Prime Minister of Canada - official confirmation of Mark Carney being sworn in as prime minister on March 14, 2025 (link)
- Tribeca Festival - official information on the world premiere, running time and production of the film "Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour - Live from Paris" (link)
- Global News - report on Perry and Trudeau's first public appearance as a couple in Paris in October 2025 (link)