Get to Know the Couple Who Wrote 'Barbie' Together, But Don't Call Her His Muse
When Greta Gerwig’s romance with Noah Baumbach began in 2011, the public loved to call her his “muse.” They met on the set of his movie Greenberg before Baumbach directed her in two more films, but “artist and muse” doesn’t capture the full scope of either their personal or working relationship—and it greatly diminishes Gerwig’s contributions to their shared projects. Baumbach directed Frances Ha and Mistress America, yes, but Gerwig co-wrote their screenplays, and in the case of Frances Ha earned a slew of nominations for her performance as the titular character.
“I did not love being called a muse,” Gerwig told Vulture in 2017. “I didn’t want to be strident about it or say, ‘Hey, give me my due,’ but I did feel like I wasn’t a bystander. It was half-mine, and so that part was difficult. Also I knew secretly that I was engaged with this longer project, and wanted to be a writer and director in my own right, so I felt like the muse business, or whatever it was, was a position that I didn’t identify with in my heart. … I also had this sense of, ‘Well, they’ll just eat their hat one day.’”
The hat-eating has happened. Gerwig's 2017 directorial debut, Lady Bird, scored her Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, while her beloved 2019 adaptation of Little Women earned six Oscar nods, including one for Gerwig’s screenplay.
That year, Gerwig and Baumbach actually competed against each other in the Best Picture category—his Marriage Story was nominated as well—but they tried to keep their competitive sides in check. “It’s very funny, but we did actually vote for ourselves,” Gerwig told The New York Times in December 2022. “We were at our computers and I was like, ‘Just so you know, I’m going to vote for myself,’ and he said, ‘OK, I’m going to vote for myself, too.’” They both ultimately lost to Parasite, but their romance—and their collaborative spirit—lives on.
Read on for a complete history of Gerwig and Baumbach’s partnership.
How did Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach meet?
Gerwig and Baumbach met on the set of the 2010 film Greenberg, which Baumbach directed and co-wrote with his then-wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh. Leigh played the ex-girlfriend of the main character, Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), while Gerwig played his new paramour, Florence.
When did Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach start dating?
Photo by Mike Marsland/WireImage for Netflix
Gerwig and Baumbach’s relationship turned romantic sometime after Baumbach’s November 2010 separation from Leigh. While some observers speculated that Gerwig and Baumbach’s romance began before his split from Leigh, a 2013 New Yorker article about Gerwig and Baumbach said the pair “firmly place the start of their romance at a point after his separation.”
While Gerwig and Baumbach were already dating when they made 2012’s Frances Ha, they kept their romance out of the spotlight for years. Their first red carpet appearance together wasn’t until 2018, when they attended the Golden Globes. Gerwig’s Lady Bird won Best Musical or Comedy, but like plenty of winners before her, she forgot to thank her significant other.
“I had an entire speech that I was going to give and I got up there and none of it came out," she recalled during an interview with The View. “I looked at Oprah and I was like, “It’s gone!’ … I had a whole thing about [Noah]. He’s my favorite writer and my favorite first reader.”
Are Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach married?
As of June 2023, Gerwig and Baumbach aren’t married, but they sometimes refer to each other as husband and wife. “‘Boyfriend’ sort of makes it sound like I just met him last week, and ‘lover’ is disgusting. And ‘fiancé’ makes it sound like there’s an imminent wedding, so none if it works," Gerwig explained during a joint interview with Baumbach on The Late Late Show With James Corden in January 2020. “But I feel like when I’m talking to old people I always say ‘husband’ because it makes them feel very at ease."
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Do Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach have kids?
Gerwig and Baumbach welcomed a son named Harold in March 2019. Later that year, Gerwig cradled baby Harold on the cover of Vogue for the magazine’s December issue. In December 2022, Gerwig announced that she was expecting her and Baumbach’s second child, another boy.
What movies have Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach made together?
Since Gerwig starred in Baumbach’s Greenberg, the couple have collaborated on a number of projects together. Baumbach directed Gerwig in 2012’s Frances Ha and 2015’s Mistress America, both of which they co-wrote. In 2017, Gerwig had an uncredited voice role in Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, and in 2022, she played a lead role in Baumbach’s film adaptation of the Don Delillo novel White Noise. Gerwig and Baumbach’s latest collaboration is Barbie, starring Margot Robbie as the titular doll and Ryan Gosling as Ken. Gerwig directed the film, which she co-wrote with Baumbach. Gerwig was also set to star in Baumbach’s HBO adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, but the show never made it to air.
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What have Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach said about their relationship?
Gerwig and Baumbach have kept their personal life relatively private over the years, but they’re more than happy to gush about each other’s work. Speaking about Frances Ha, Baumbach said that he learned right away how talented Gerwig was. “I sort of started by saying, like, ‘Here’s sort of the thing I’m thinking about. Why don’t you write down a bunch of ideas and things,’” Baumbach recalled in October 2022 at the BFI London Film Festival. “What I didn’t know is that Greta was this incredible writer, I mean, I had a feeling she’d be a great collaborator, but that writing really was kind of her thing when she was in college, and so I really lucked out. It was amazing.”
Baumbach has also said that he and Gerwig work well together because they have “a lot of the same sensibilities” and enjoy many of the same films. “In writing, behavioral building blocks are interesting to both of us, so when we start talking about doing something together, there’s a lot of common ground, even though we’re bringing in our own perspectives and our own lives to it, but it feels very easy,” he told Collider in 2015. “[The Frances Ha and Mistress America] scripts felt like they’re very much of one voice—even though we’re working on our own scenes separately. We bring them together and they would go together without having to do much to them. … It’s less lonely, too, to work with somebody.”
Gerwig, for her part, has said that Baumbach is “the most important” collaborator in her life, but emphasized that she would have become a filmmaker no matter what. “I think I was hell-bent on making my own films, so I would’ve done it anyway,” she explained to Vogue in December 2019.
When did Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh break up?
Leigh filed for divorce from Baumbach in November 2010, eight months after the arrival of their son, Rohmer. They finalized their split in September 2013. While some viewers theorized that Baumbach’s 2019 film Marriage Story was about his breakup from Leigh, Baumbach has said that the movie doesn’t have much in common with his real life.
“This movie is not autobiographical; it’s personal, and there’s a true distinction in that,” he told The New York Times in November 2019. In another interview with WSJ Magazine, Baumbach said that he showed Leigh the script for Marriage Story and she was impressed by what she saw. “And then I showed her the movie a little bit ago,” he said in 2019. "She likes it a lot.”
In 2016, Leigh said that she hadn’t rewatched Greenberg, which she co-wrote with Baumbach, or Margot at the Wedding, her first collaboration with her now ex. “I haven’t revisited those movies,” she told The Guardian at the time. “I think they’re both good movies. Y’know, I enjoyed the process of making them.”