Katy Perry has had a week that bounced between New York and Los Angeles with unusual velocity: on June 8, she walked the Tribeca Festival red carpet with Justin Trudeau at the world premiere of her concert documentary, telling the press that the former Canadian prime minister is “the love of my life.” Four days later, she was on the SoFi Stadium stage in Los Angeles, headlining the FIFA World Cup 2026 opening ceremony alongside Future, LISA, Anitta, Rema, and Tyla, in front of the largest soccer crowd ever assembled in the United States.
The Tribeca premiere was the couple’s first official red carpet appearance together. Trudeau, seated beside Perry in the OKX Theater, was photographed singing along to the film throughout the screening, holding her hand. Perry did not hedge when reporters asked about the relationship. “I’m very in love,” she said. “He’s the love of my life. And meeting him after everything I went through last year makes me feel really whole now.”
That last year, she told The Hollywood Reporter’s Lexi Carson in her post-premiere interview, was “probably one of the hardest years of my life.” Perry described going “through a fuck ton” — a list that includes her public split from actor Orlando Bloom and the sustained backlash that followed her 2025 space flight on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket. What kept her moving was a triple promise: “I made a promise to my fans, I made a promise to my daughter, I made a promise to myself.”
The documentary at the center of the premiere — Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour – Live from Paris, directed by Paul Dugdale and filmed in November 2025 at a Paris show supporting her album 143 — is scheduled for theatrical release this summer. The production featured Perry performing upside down and riding a winged creature, the kind of sci-fi spectacle that has defined her touring career since the Prismatic World Tour. When the power briefly went out during the OKX Theater screening, Perry led an impromptu sing-along in the dark.
The World Cup opening ceremony on June 12 at SoFi Stadium was a different register entirely: 100,000 people, a pre-match broadcast to a global television audience in the hundreds of millions, and the symbolic weight of the United States hosting the FIFA World Cup for the first time since 1994. Perry arrived in a silver sequined gown by Stella McCartney and performed “Wonder” — her 2024 track — in a duet with Tius Luka, a 10-year-old Norwegian singer, surrounded by flags from every competing nation. The pair concluded the performance with Perry lifting Tius into her arms as the stadium erupted. The host nation then won the opening match 4-1 over Paraguay. Deadline’s gallery from the Los Angeles opening events and Billboard’s roundup of the ceremony’s best moments captured the scope of the night.
The Perry/World Cup pairing is notable in its own right. She has been among the most requested artists for major global ceremonies for the better part of a decade — the 2015 Super Bowl halftime show, the 2023 King Charles III coronation concert at Windsor Castle, and now the World Cup. What makes June 2026 different is the dual register: the intimate, vulnerable Tribeca audience hearing about her relationship and her hard year, followed four days later by SoFi Stadium and the global broadcast. The Perry who told The Hollywood Reporter she felt “really whole now” is the same one standing at center stage at the biggest sporting event on American soil in thirty-two years. In a week where David Beckham earned his Hollywood Walk of Fame star and spoke of his own love for the World Cup landing in North America, Perry gave the tournament its opening voice.
For the rest of the summer, Perry has more than 20 festival shows beginning June 18 in Santiago, Spain. She is, by any measure, in the middle of something — a relationship that has reset her personal life, a documentary that revisits the tour she mounted while that life was at its hardest, and a World Cup stage that confirmed whatever hard year 2025 was, 2026 is operating on different terms. Taylor Swift earned a Songwriters Hall of Fame induction and a Lennon-McCartney comparison from Steven Spielberg in the same week. Ariana Grande launched a foundation with four funds targeting LGBTQ+ rights, mental health, and crisis relief. June 2026 has been, for the women who define American pop music, a week of consequential firsts. Perry’s contribution was a hand-hold in a New York theatre and a microphone on the world’s biggest stage.
