Working my way backwards, to see if I can reconstruct some of my pre-captcha thoughts from the other night.
The main reasons I don’t think that the SoS was planned too far in advance:
• The longer they planned it, the more time there was for someone on his team or in his family to question whether it really was a good idea and persuade the rest.
• The longer they had, couldn’t have they have come up with a more realistic-looking romance? (“Let’s get them photographed in the new paparazzi hot spot, Rhode Island! Let’s have them meet each others’ families after only a couple weeks!”)
The reasons I think it more likely came together in May (at least on his end) - although we might see him as having been riding high then, he may not have felt that way, especially if he’s extremely ambitious:
• CP had poor box office and mixed reviews; ISTL had poor reviews for the film itself (which killed his chance of lots of awards noms for his performance); and High-Rise had both low box office and mixed reviews, most of which focused on Wheatley’s interpretation and not on Tom’s performance. Yes, TNM was a huge hit in the UK, but it wasn’t over here. And the reviews of it from major US outlets uniformly made a crack about “one long Bond audition tape.”
• KSI turned out to be not the leading-man role he’d signed up for, but a comparatively small part in a very large cast.
• Then came the news about Loki. While I agree that he probably didn’t care about the role from an artistic standpoint any longer, it was a great safety net for his career – a big paycheck, lots of publicity, and good reviews every few years. Not easy to get that kind of good thing going as an actor.
• So at that point, he might have been off balance enough to agree to a really bad idea to get him a lot more PR.
All that said, I hadn’t heard that he started following TS in Feb. ’16; I knew she had followed him several months before the Met, but not the reverse. And that “no ring on this finger” comment was strange, though it could have been a Freudian-slip message to his current FWB (EO, JA, who knows?) that their thing wasn’t serious (right up there with “nothing to write home about”).