Most of Hollywood spent yesterday sleeping off a really long, alcohol-soaked night and early morning of post-Golden Globes partying. So there’s not a lot of news today, although I am going to get to the Lance Armstrong stuff in a minute. Before I get that, we need to talk about this amazing and unbelievable (as in, I don’t believe it) story from The Daily Mail. The Mail claims… wait for it… that Jessica Chastain has been quietly dating Tom Hiddleston for a few months. Cover your ears to block out the sounds of the high-pitched wailing from Hiddleston’s fan-girls. “NOT HER!” they will scream. “SHE’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH!” they will cry.

She declared a strict ‘no actors’ dating policy this year after a frightening experience with paparazzi. But it seems Jessica Chastain has already broken that vow, and fallen into the arms of War Horse star Tom Hiddleston.

The the flame-haired, porcelain-skinned Hollywood star, who has just been nominated for an Oscar for spy thriller Zero Dark Thirty, is the actor’s new object of affection.

‘Tom is taken with Jess and it’s serious,’ says a friend. ‘Before Christmas she visited Britain to stay with him and meet all his family for the first time.’

The couple certainly appear well suited. While Tom starred in two of last year’s Oscar-nominated films and trained at Rada, Californian-born Jessica — who trained at prestigious New York drama school Juilliard — is equally at home on the red carpet after starring in 2012 Oscar favourites The Help and The Tree Of Life. However, Jessica, 35, and Tom, 31, who previously dated theatre actress Susannah Fielding, are at pains to keep their new union quiet.

Jessica, in particular, is notoriously private about her past lovers.

‘In this business it’s very tough to maintain a relationship because we’re like gypsies — always on the move,’ she has said. ‘And the more you share your relationship with the world the less special it becomes. So I always try to keep my dating life quiet.’

The actress also famously declared all actors off-limits in an interview with InStyle UK published earlier this month, in which she confessed dating an unnamed actor left her ‘freaking out’.

‘I have a rule. No actors,’ she proclaimed. ‘I have dated an actor before, at Juilliard, but since then, I’ve only been on a couple of dates with one and I was so freaked out someone was going to take a picture of us, because they were famous.’

Another reason, she said, was she wanted something to talk about other than movie making and work.

She recalled: ‘I realised I wanted just to be able to hang out with someone… And I didn’t want to talk about the business, first of all. I love movies. But I love talking about them like when I was 15 years old. I’m a film fan, but I don’t want to talk about auditions or what movie I’m gonna do. I find that so boring.’

[From The Mail]

Yeah, I find it hard to believe that Jessica would so vociferously deny dating actors while she is currently and secretly dating an actor. Jessica might be kind of weird/odd about her dating life, but I think she realizes that she can’t go on and on about not dating actors in interviews while she’s “secretly dating” Tom Hiddleston. Or maybe it’s all a game with them? Or maybe it’s BS.

As for the possibility that this is on… I wouldn’t hate them as a couple. She’s a few years older than him – last time anyone got a real number out of anyone on Jessica’s age, I think the claim is that she’s around 35 years old…? And Tom is 31 years old. So, no big difference. And they would look sexy together – sexy and brainy. They would be kind of a pretentious couple, but I could see them having some heat.

Photos courtesy of Pacific Coast News and WENN.