After premiering at Sundance and Cannes earlier this year, the hotly-anticipated film Dope is being released to nationwide audiences on Friday, June 19. There are a lot of reasons to recommend this movie, from the critical acclaim it's been garnering to the coming-of-age plot, but the thing I'm personally most interested in is the fact that it stars a real-life couple: A$AP Rocky and Chanel Iman.
The first thing you might be wondering is whether the couple is still together. Well, unfortunately they're not. But seeing real-life couples interact with each other in movies together is one of my favorite things, right behind food on sticks and French bulldogs. It makes me feel like a fly on the wall of their relationship, so I wanted to get to the bottom of this right away to see if Rocky and Iman were still a couple during filming.
And as it turns out — they might havejustended things! It took some digging around, because obviously I can't just get on social media and check when they became Facebook-official, but I think I've come up with a pretty good timeline of their relationship and how it coincides with the movie's production.
After months of speculation, Iman confirmed her relationship with Rocky in May 2013 by posting a photo of herself kissing him, so it's safe to say they'd been together for a minute at that point, if they were comfortable with other people knowing about it. Then it looks like they were together for just over a year from that point, with Rocky revealing that he and Iman broke up in June 2014 because, in his words, "she deserves better than me". Yikes. That's some heavy stuff.
Luckily for them, the two have managed to remain friends (best friends, in fact!), and but there's a very good chance they weren't together during Dope's filming, but had only just broken up. IMDb's trivia section on the movie reveals that Rocky only auditioned and was cast as Dom after helping Iman run lines for her character Lily. But the film's director, Rick Famuyiwa spoke to Deadline in May 2015 and explained, "It was a 25-day shoot, and it was less than a year ago. A year ago, we hadn’t even locked in all our financing." So, this means at the earliest, the film started shooting in June 2014, which would've been right around when Rocky and Iman broke up.
So there you have it! Even though they've been broken up for a year at this point, it sounds like they're still on excellent terms. Phew. That was a lot of detective work for one day!
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