This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
Dakota Johnson and musician Role Model are no longer together, and according to a new report, they have not been for some time.
A source close to the situation told PEOPLE that the actress and the singer, whose real name is Tucker Pillsbury, ended their relationship “a while ago,” even though neither of them has said a single public word about it.
Representatives for both stars have not issued any statement confirming or explaining the split, leaving fans to piece the timeline together from a relationship that was, by design, never loudly announced in the first place.
What makes this breakup particularly striking is not the split itself, but the gap between when it apparently happened and when the public found out.
Johnson and Pillsbury spent much of the last several months being photographed together, collaborating on music, and showing up in each other’s orbit in ways that read like a couple still together.
That the relationship had already quietly ended behind the scenes, possibly for weeks before anyone reported it, has left plenty of fans feeling like they were watching reruns of a story that had already wrapped.
A relationship that moved from casual to serious, then apparently ended without warning
Johnson and Pillsbury were first linked in December 2025, when photos surfaced of the two having a candlelit dinner together in Los Angeles alongside friends.
At the time, Johnson was less than six months removed from her split from Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, whom she had dated on and off since 2017 before their relationship ended for good in June 2025.
A source told PEOPLE in November, ahead of the Pillsbury sightings, that Johnson had been “slowly dating again,” adding that she seemed “lighter and more at peace” after the end of her long relationship with Martin.
The connection between Johnson and Pillsbury continued into the new year. The pair were spotted dining together again in mid-January, and by early April they were photographed sharing a kiss, holding hands, and getting coffee together in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood.
Johnson’s mother, actress Melanie Griffith, even weighed in publicly around that time, telling a photographer she thought Pillsbury was “fabulous” when asked about her daughter’s new relationship.
By that same month, a source told PEOPLE the romance had grown into something more substantial than a passing fling. “It’s definitely more than a fling, or just a flirt,” the source said, noting that Johnson and Pillsbury had been together “since late last year.”
The source added that Johnson “does really like” the musician but was intentionally taking things slow given how recently her relationship with Martin had ended. Other insiders described the relationship around this time as “easy” and said the two seemed “very much on the same page.”
The song, the studio, and the collaboration that came right before the split
Perhaps the most public marker of the relationship came in late July, just weeks before the breakup news surfaced. During a late-night concert in Chicago on July 30, Pillsbury debuted a new song called “Love I You,” which features a flirtatious spoken word interlude built from voice notes recorded by Johnson herself.
Fans in the crowd captured the moment on video, and the exchange spread quickly online, with Pillsbury singing lines like “Hey, I think you’re perfect,” and Johnson’s voice responding, “You say that to everyone.”
Pillsbury later described how the collaboration came together, telling PEOPLE that Johnson essentially talked her way into the booth rather than being asked outright to participate. “I had a lot of names to pick from for that, and then Dakota came to the studio one day, and Mason was like, ‘Why don’t you do it?’” Pillsbury said, referring to his guitarist and producer, Mason Stoops.
He recalled hesitating about mixing his personal relationship with his work, saying he initially resisted the idea before Johnson jumped in and recorded her part anyway. The song appears on Pillsbury’s album “Chuck Timely & the Hourglass,” which was released on August 7, only about two weeks before news of the split became public.
That timing is part of what has made this particular breakup feel so unusual to fans and entertainment reporters alike.
A collaboration as personal as a voice note cameo on a love song is not something artists typically release in the immediate aftermath of a breakup, which suggests that whatever led Johnson and Pillsbury to go their separate ways happened relatively recently, or at least recently enough that the album’s release schedule had already been locked in well before either of them decided the relationship was over.
No explanation given, and two very different past relationships behind them
Neither Johnson nor Pillsbury has addressed the breakup directly, and no source has offered a specific reason for why the relationship ended. That silence is consistent with how both stars have generally handled their personal lives in the past, choosing not to confirm relationships publicly even as photographers and fans tracked their outings in real time.
Johnson, in particular, has spoken previously about not being especially experienced with modern dating. In comments to Elle UK before her relationship with Pillsbury began, she said, “I’ve never dated anybody. I’ve had boyfriends, but I have never been on a dating app. I just don’t know that world.”
Johnson, 36, spent nearly eight years in an on-and-off relationship with Martin, 49, before that relationship ended for good in June 2025. Pillsbury, 29, was previously in a three-year relationship with internet personality Emma Chamberlain, which ended in 2023.
He has said in past interviews that the relationship ended partly because of his homesickness and his desire to return to his native Maine, telling the Zach Sang Show in 2024 that he had been “having this weird quarter-life crisis type of thing” at the time.
For now, the only confirmed detail about the end of the Johnson and Pillsbury relationship is the timing itself, described only as “a while ago” by the source who spoke to PEOPLE.
Given how recently the two were still appearing together in public and collaborating in the studio, the exact point at which things fell apart remains unclear, and both parties appear content to leave it that way.
Whether either of them addresses the split more directly in the future is something only time, and perhaps another one of Pillsbury’s songs, will tell.
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