As usual, InStyle magazine's annual bash drew the festival's red-carpet eye candy: Young stars Abbie Cornish, Andrea Riseborough and Olivia Wilde were there, along with Jennifer Garner. Geoffrey Rush, that TIFF stalwart, showed up. And even Katie Couric – in town for some charity work – dropped in.
Since InStyle remains one of Hollywood's reigning fashion bibles (the party on Tuesday at the Windsor Arms Hotel was hosted by Tommy Hilfiger) and the magazine's cheeky portraits at the event end up in the November issue, celebs consider it a must-do photo op. Perhaps that's why guests all look so lovely.
Chace Crawford, at TIFF to promote Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, was certainly ready for his close-up. He sporting a gunmetal silver power suit and flashed that killer smile of his to photographers all night.
And we mean all night. The actor who plays the dreamy trophy boyfriend on the TV series Gossip Girls was on the party's secret smoking terrace with Adam Brody, Shane West and Rodrigo Santoro late into the evening.
And as security started "urging" people to leave the venue at 2 a.m., Crawford and Brody allowed themselves to be "kidnapped" by actress Lyndsy Fonseca and West to an after-hours club downtown. (Also sprinting to a Beck taxi en masse was another gang of Hollywood up-and-comers including Juno Temple, Lily Cole and Emile Hirsch.)
Crawford's exit drove fans waiting by the hotel's barricades into a frenzy. One group in particular, a pack of seven rabid teenage girls who had been waiting around for hours, threw themselves onto the hood of the taxi, screaming, "Chace! I love you Chace!" The scene was so manic that Santoro blanked on where he was headed and told the driver, in his adorable Brazilian accent, to go to "Choponsky's."
That could be at least two places in Toronto (Caplansky's deli? Czehoski's bar?). The cab stalled, the actor burst out laughing – then decided that promoting his TIFF film Heleno the next day sans hangover was probably wise – and called it a night.