Last month’s release of The Kissing Booth 2 reignited social media speculation about the relationship between Joey King and Jacob Elordi. The film’s star (and executive producer) has seen the chatter and wants to make things clear: there’s no bad blood whatsoever.
Appearing on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show, King said that she and Elordi are actually on good terms. If anything, she's grateful for the lessons that she learned from the relationship — like, never dating a fellow actor ever again.
"I think it’s a good thing we dated in the first place," she told Stern on the show. "I learned the most I’ve ever learned in my life from him."
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"It’s awesome to date someone in your field, who gets it, but doing the same exact thing as somebody is tough," King continued candidly. "It’s really tough."
King and Elordi met in 2017 while working on the first Kissing Booth movie in, in which they played teen love interests keeping their budding relationship on the low. The sparks seen on camera were the real deal, and before long, the young pair revealed that their working relationship had blossomed into a romantic relationship. By that summer, King and Elordi had gone become Instagram official, and they made their official debut as a couple throughout the film's press tour.
However, fans began to speculate that the stars had quietly split months later after noticing that they weren't actively posting each other on social media anymore. The breakup theories were pretty much confirmed when King explained the emotional fallout of the life change in a 2019 conversation with Refinery29.
"When you're going through something and the world wants to go through it with you or [wants] to get every piece of detail from you about it, it's really difficult. Some of these things are just meant for you,” she said. "It was a little difficult going through some of that stuff a couple months ago."
Awkwardly enough, King and Elordi were brought back together for The Kissing Booth 2, which saw them reprising their roles as Elle Evans and Noah Flynn. Fans of the Netflix film noticed that the dynamic between the exes was different, to say the least; Elordi rarely appeared in interviews with King and the rest of the cast, and he seemed genuinely disconnected from the project in general, even admitting that he hadn't tuned in for the movie despite it being on of the most watched projects on Netflix following its release.
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King called him out of the admission, writing up a tweet that claimed Elordi was "capping" about not having seen his own movie. She later deleted the tweet, but only because she didn't want to appropriate AAVE.
"I head the term ‘capping’ on like Tik Tok and Twitter and Instagram, through friends, and I was like ‘I guess this is the new thing.’ Apparently its not," she revealed on The Howard Stern Show. "It’s something I should not have used as a white person. Two accounts on Twitter called me out for it, that’s why I deleted it."
Her ex-boyfriend was totally okay with her playful callout — in fact, King had even given him a heads up that she was going to share it online, and he gave her the green light.
"I did get his permission to tweet it so that was fine.” King laughed. “He had a good sense of humor about that tweet, for sure."
I guess this is how you ex.