Director Sam Taylor-Johnson refuses to pay attention to the intrusion into her marriage. The first time she met Aaron Taylor-Johnson (then Aaron Johnson) was on the set of Nowhere Boy, in which he played John Lennon, shortly after her divorce from art dealer Jay Jopling in 2008. The following year, the actor proposed.
At the time, she was 42, while he was 18, an age difference that drew unwelcome attention. Meanwhile, they’ve become increasingly famous, with him appearing on several shortlists for potential James Bond actors. He recently starred opposite Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy.
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“There are times where it’s uncomfortable,” Taylor-Johnson told The Hollywood Reporter when asked about the attention the couple receives. “Most of the time, we zone it out and stay pretty private. We tend to retreat. Kids and school runs keep you pretty grounded.”
In 2012, the Taylor-Johnsons, who now live on a farm in Somerset, England, got married, and each took the other’s last name. Her two daughters from her first marriage, now ages 26 and 17, have grown up with them, and they have two more daughters together, ages 12 and 13, whom she all calls “four strong, opinionated young women,” Taylor-Johnson said.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson spoke to Rolling Stone U.K. in March about the public fascination with him and his wife. “What you gotta realize is that what most people were doing in their twenties, I was doing when I was 13,” he said, describing the interest in his relationship as “bizarre.”
In the interview, Aaron Taylor-Johnson questioned why he must be judged based on his life events. “You’re doing something too quickly for someone else? I don’t understand that. What speed are you supposed to enjoy life at? It’s bizarre to me,” he said.
In 2019, Sam Taylor-Johnson told Harper’s Bazaar, “As soon as we finished (filming), he told me he was going to marry me. “We had never been on a date or even kissed. “And a year to the minute after we met, exactly one year to the minute, I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me,” Aaron Taylor-Johnson added.
The Taylor-Johnsons have previously stated that they tend to keep their personal lives away from the public due to their significant age difference. “The attention was intrusive,” Aaron Taylor-Johnson told New York Magazine in 2017 regarding the initial response to their relationship. “But having to deal with that early in my career probably got me to a place where I can more quickly just go, ‘Oh, (expletive) it’ instead of wanting to rip someone’s head off for asking questions I don’t like.”
