On Saturday night, March 28, Paul McCartney played the second of two intimate shows at the Fonda Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The Fonda is a 1,200-capacity venue that on this particular evening contained one of the most improbable celebrity guest lists ever assembled in a single room.
Taylor Swift was there. John Mayer was there. Olivia Rodrigo was there. Ringo Starr was there.
So were Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Stevie Nicks, Margot Robbie, Harrison Ford, Al Pacino, Reese Witherspoon, Emma Watson, Steve Carell, Steven Tyler, Christina Aguilera, Queen Latifah, Jon Hamm, Anthony Kiedis, Beck, Janelle Monáe, Gayle King, Laura Dern, Owen Wilson, and dozens more.
For most of them it was simply a night at a once-in-a-lifetime show. For Taylor Swift, it required a strategy.
Photos obtained by TMZ show Swift inside the Fonda chatting with Olivia Rodrigo and other guests while John Mayer, Swift’s ex-boyfriend, socialized separately with his own group nearby.
The photos show two people at the same small venue clearly occupying different orbits. When it came time to leave, Swift slipped out through a different exit than Mayer, sidestepping what would have been, depending on your perspective, either a deeply awkward encounter or the most dramatic celebrity sighting of 2026.
TMZ described it as a “narrowly missed run-in.” It is unclear whether the two crossed paths inside the venue itself.
Why Were Mayer and Swift In The Same Room?
Swift, 36, and Mayer, 48, were romantically linked in 2009, when she was 19 and he was 32. Their relationship was brief and ended, and then in October 2010 Swift released the track “Dear John” on her Speak Now album.
The song’s title alone has never been particularly subtle. Mayer addressed the rumors that the track was about him in a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, calling it “a really lousy thing to do” and saying he felt “really caught off guard.”
Swift responded by calling Mayer “presumptuous” and declined to confirm or deny who the song was about, noting she does not publicly reveal who her music references.
That exchange was 14 years ago. Both have moved on in the most public way possible. Swift is engaged to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, with a wedding coming this Summer.
Mayer was last reported to be dating influencer Kat Stickler. But Saturday night at the Fonda Theatre, in a room that holds 1,200 people, finding a different door on the way out was apparently still the move.
Kelce was not at the McCartney show. Swift had been with him the night before at the iHeartRadio Music Awards on March 26, where she won seven awards including Album of the Year and Artist of the Year for her 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl.
During her acceptance speech for Best Pop Album she credited the album’s “happy and confident” tone to Kelce.
A video circulating on X from the iHeartRadio Awards shows Swift hugging Kelce during RAYE’s performance at exactly the moment the lyric “Where the hell is my husband? What is taking him so long to find me?” played. Fans responded accordingly.
The Swift and Rodrigo Moment
Perhaps equally notable to the exit strategy was who Swift was photographed with inside the venue.
Deuxmoi published an exclusive caption on photos showing Swift and Olivia Rodrigo chatting together as they left, describing the two pop stars talking with friends while Mayer departed separately behind Tate McRae and Jake Shane before leaving solo.
The Swift and Rodrigo relationship has been a subject of fan speculation for years. Rodrigo, whose breakthrough album Sour in 2021 drew widespread comparisons to Swift’s work and generated significant public discussion about the nature of their relationship, has had a complicated standing in the Swifties ecosystem ever since.
Photos of the two chatting warmly as they exited the McCartney show were enough for fans online to declare the matter resolved. One commenter wrote, “thank god like we can put the alleged beef to rest now.”
Another noted the specific geometry of the situation, writing, “what an awkward reunion of people, right???” in reference to Swift, Rodrigo, and Mayer all being in the same building simultaneously.
What Was Paul McCartney Celebrating?
The reason any of this happened is that Paul McCartney, 83, decided to play two shows at the Fonda Theatre as his first live performances since wrapping his Got Back Tour in 2025, and he chose to do it in Los Angeles.
The shows were genuinely difficult to attend. Tickets were available only through a fan registration system via AXS, and the venue’s capacity of 1,200 meant that demand vastly outstripped supply.
The concerts coincided with the announcement of McCartney’s first new album in five years, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, due out in May 2026. He released the lead single “Days We Left Behind” ahead of the shows, though notably he did not perform it either night.
The setlists were heavy with Beatles and Wings material. He played “Hey Jude” and “Help!” from the Beatles catalogue and “Band on the Run” and “Let ‘Em In” from his Wings years.
He also performed solo material including “Maybe I’m Amazed” and “Let Me Roll It.”
He kept politics largely out of the show with one exception: a joke about President Trump’s dance moves that earned his name a round of boos from the audience.
The shows required attendees to lock their phones away before entering, which is why no photos from inside circulated during the concert itself.
What did emerge afterward were images of the extraordinary collection of people walking out of the venue together, which produced most of the coverage.
Ringo Starr, McCartney’s surviving Beatles bandmate, was in the building. So was Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, whose presence prompted reporting about a rumored McCartney appearance at an upcoming Apple event.
Jobs famously cited the Beatles as his model for business creativity and used their music to demonstrate the original iPhone in 2007, and Apple and the Beatles’ Apple Corps were once locked in a lengthy trademark dispute before settling.
Also present were Paul McCartney’s daughter-in-law Maggie Baird, mother of Billie Eilish and Finneas, giving the room a quality where multiple generations of the same families were in attendance simultaneously.
Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother and primary collaborator, was there alongside their mother as Billie attended separately.
What McCartney produced on Saturday night at the Fonda was described by CNN as “a much-needed escape and salve” for an audience that had surrendered their phones and come specifically to sit in a room with great music and, as it turned out, everyone they have ever seen on a magazine cover.
A 39-year-old graphic designer named Derek Heath told CNN before the show, “I just feel like art and community and any sort of gathering around something that’s going to uplift us or bring us closer to each other in our city, that’s the antidote to troubled times.”
He said that before knowing Taylor Swift would use a different door on the way out.
