In relocation sociology there’s a term, “trailing spouse,” coined for corporate transfers: the partner whose job, identity, and social calendar get restructured around someone else’s promotion. I picked it up in a UT Austin seminar on labor and gender, back when I assumed I’d spend my career writing about wage gaps instead of fourth-and-short conversions, and it has never stopped being useful for describing celebrity couples. It just usually gets applied backwards.
That’s roughly what’s happening in the coverage of Josh Allen’s new production company. On September 1, the Buffalo Bills quarterback announced Out of Pocket Studios, with himself as CEO and executive producer, building on the alliance he struck with Skydance Sports back in January 2025. Josh Allen’s Out of Pocket Studios launch is being read, almost uniformly, as evidence of a guy having a monster year off the field, conveniently timed months after he called his wife, actor Hailee Steinfeld, an “absolute rockstar” at a press conference the day after their daughter’s birth was announced. Everyone’s going to read this as a football story with a celebrity attached. It isn’t. It’s a story about what happens when an athlete’s marketability starts getting measured by his wife’s résumé instead of his own stat line, and the instant, uncomplicated way sports media reached for “big year for Josh Allen” says something about who these outlets are used to crediting by default.
Worth getting the quote direction right, since even outlets covering the studio news have started blurring who said what about whom. Allen was the one gushing. “I’ve got an absolute rockstar of a wife, that’s doing so many things right now and allowing me to be here right now and be with my teammates,” Allen said at the press conference, and the line traveled fast because Josh Allen calling Hailee Steinfeld a rockstar new mom is a tidy, shareable sentence. Steinfeld’s own reaction to the studio announcement, for what it’s worth, was drier: she reposted Variety’s writeup to her Instagram Stories with the caption “OOPS!!!!,” a pun on the studio’s name that dissolved after 24 hours, the way Stories do. Not exactly a load-bearing endorsement, more a wink on her way out the door.
The studio itself has a real slate. There’s “America’s Tailgate,” a CBS Labor Day special co-hosted by Nate Burleson and Melanie Collins; “NFL Play Action,” a weekly Paramount+ show premiering September 9 with Kyle Brandt and Ally Love; and “The Buffalo Miracle,” a Ben Proudfoot-directed documentary about a Buffalo blizzard rescue, made with Breakwater Studios and Skydance Sports, according to SI.com’s rundown of the launch. Lindsey Cohen, formerly of Meadowlark Media, DAZN, and CAA, runs strategy and operations. This is a real Josh Allen production studio with real executives and a real release calendar, not a vanity press release. None of that is in dispute.
What’s in dispute is the framing that treats this as the marquee entertainment news of the Allen-Steinfeld household. Hailee Steinfeld built Beau Society and Angel Margarita first, and neither is a hobby. Beau Society, her membership media brand, just hit its 100th issue. She marked it herself:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DcmOsU2FhU7/
Angel Margarita, the ready-to-drink tequila cocktail she co-founded with Jordi Zindel and Rodrigo Hernandez in partnership with Premium Beers Group, launched into an already crowded canned-cocktail market and found shelf space anyway, exactly the consumer-brand execution Allen’s studio hasn’t attempted yet and may never need to. And that’s before touching the acting career, which started with a 2007 TV credit and a 2010 Oscar nomination for “True Grit” at age fourteen, then kept going through Pitch Perfect, Bumblebee, Hawkeye, the Spider-Verse films, and 2025’s “Sinners,” which pulled sixteen Academy Award nominations and won four. Two decades of infrastructure, built entirely before she and Allen went public in 2023.
I don’t think Josh Allen sat down and decided to launch a studio because his wife has one. The Skydance deal predates their going public by years in Allen’s own career arc. But the coverage doesn’t have to be intentional to be revealing. It just has to be consistent, and it is. Steinfeld keeps getting flattened into “Josh Allen’s wife” in stories about her own milestones, the way another athlete-adjacent star who keeps resisting the WAG label has learned to expect. There’s a smaller, dumber version of this same instinct in the fan replies whenever Allen mentions Steinfeld’s films, a recurring scramble to fit whatever he says into a “supportive husband” arc, regardless of whether the movie in question is one where his wife plays a lead role opposite someone else. It’s not really about the movie. It’s about needing the story to stay centered on him.
None of this is new to football specifically. Travis Kelce spent an entire training camp fielding questions that were really about his fiancée’s tour schedule, the last quarterback whose offseason got narrated through his fiancée’s fame. That dynamic got treated as a novelty, a quirky role reversal worth a thousand thinkpieces. Allen calling his wife a rockstar and then launching a studio in the same news cycle gets treated as just Tuesday. The asymmetry in how each got covered says more about the assumptions going in than about either relationship.
Allen and Steinfeld got married May 31, 2025, and welcomed their daughter, nicknamed Beau, this past April. A year in, they’re still figuring out how two independently loaded careers sit next to each other in public, which is a more interesting question than “who’s having a bigger year.” She marked their first anniversary with an old photo and a caption that undersold the whole thing:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DZBpWL4FuPV/
I keep going back and forth on whether the “rockstar” line was Allen doing something generous — publicly crediting a partner whose work often gets talked about in terms of who she’s married to — or just the easiest available compliment for a guy who now has a studio and a newsletter’s worth of press to generate. Maybe it’s both. The instinct to resolve that tension into a clean verdict is exactly the instinct I’d ask you to sit with a little longer.
