There are so many examples of co-stars who worked together and then dated. However, one of my favorite celebrity couples is Carrie Preston and Michael Emerson. The two have been married since 1998, and the Elsbeth and Lost stars have worked together a bunch of times. Now, The Good Wife actress has revealed her meet-cute with her partner, and it involved a few wrong assumptions, as she thought he was gay and not into her at first.
We’re very close to Elsbeth’s Season 3 premiere on the 2025 TV schedule, and in the lead-up to that, Carrie Preston appeared on Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson. They talked a lot about the show; however, they also talked about last season’s villain, and Preston’s actual husband, Michael Emerson. Specifically, they discussed the two actors’ love story, which started when they met doing Hamlet at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.
Carrie Preston explained that when rehearsals began, she immediately clocked Emerson and his classy sense of style, explaining:
I got cast, and then the first day of rehearsal, in walks this guy in a three-piece suit…I was like, ‘Wow,’ everybody else is in like actor-wear, and he’s in a three-piece suit playing Guildenstern. I was like, ‘Who the hell’s that guy?’
As the story went on, Preston told the Modern Family actor that she’d “fallen in love with [Emerson] already on stage.” However, when she walked into rehearsal and saw him in that three-piece suit,she immediately made an assumption about him, saying:
He walked into rehearsal with the three-piece suit, and I was like, ‘Oh, he’s gay.’ I was like, ‘He’s gay. Oh, no, OK, I have another crush on the gay guys,’ because they’re the coolest ones, and they’re always well-dressed and so polite.
She went on to say that she was “totally stereotyping,” and also lightheartedly talked about it with Ferguson, saying that gay guys are always the most talented and some of her best friends. All that led her to think:
I was like, ‘OK, damn it.’ You know? ‘All right, I’ll just be friends with this guy.’
A conversation with her brother, John Preston, quickly proved that assumption wrong, though, as Preston said:
I asked my brother, I was like, ‘Hey, you know, what do you think about this Michael Emerson guy?’ Because my brother was trying to hook me up with some other guy that was in the master’s program. I was like, ‘Well, what about Michael Emerson?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, Emerson’s cool.’ I was like, ‘But he’s gay, right?’ And he’s like, ‘No.’ He was like, ‘He’s so not.’
After that, she explained that she started getting nervous around the Lost actor. However, their relationship quickly developed as he started leaving her flowers, and they attended a party together. Preston went on to say that in the world of regional theater, if you go to a cast party with someone “you’re dating,” and then they really were a very serious couple right after that, as she said:
Like, a month later, I was calling my mom, ‘You need to come meet the man I’m gonna marry. I’m not gonna tell him that. But you need to come meet the man.’
And the rest is history. Now, they’ve been together for 31 years, married for 27, and they’ve starred alongside each other in some of the 2000s’ best dramas. That’s a long and successful marriage, whether it’s in show business or not. These two truly are couple goals, and it’s so funny that their meet-cute started the way it did.
Now, to see them together on the screen, you can stream Elsbeth with a Paramount+ subscription, because Emerson played the Moriarty to Preston’s Sherlock in Season 2. Then, not only will you have seen this power couple acting against each other, you’ll also be all caught up on this CBS mystery show just in time for its Season 3 premiere, which is slated on the 2025 TV schedule for Sunday, October 12 at 9:30 p.m. ET (it will then return to its normal Thursday night, timeslot after that).
In the meantime, I’ll be thinking about this adorable meet-cute that sparked a lovely relationship between these two wonderful actors.