Paul Rudd ages like a fine wine — and so does his marriage to wife Julie Yaeger.
The Ant-Man actor and the screenwriter, who share two children, have been together since a chance meeting at Rudd’s publicist’s office in the mid-‘90s.
The Clueless star, who had just come off the huge success of the 1995 rom-com, moved to New York City and arrived at the PR firm with his luggage in hand, he told Nylon Guys in 2011. He was late to an audition, he explained, and Yaeger offered to deliver his bags to his friend’s apartment. The couple dined together the next day, and the rest is history.
“We started talking and there was a maturity with her – she had experienced some tragedy in her life, I had too, and the impression I got was, wow, this is a woman. This isn’t a girl,” Rudd recalled to Marie Claire UK in 2018.
“He got more than PR,” Yaeger later quipped on Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilarie Burton’s talk show, Friday Night in With the Morgans.
Rudd and Yeager have developed a close friendship with Morgan and Burton over the years, even taking over the Rhinebeck, New York, candy store Samuel’s Sweet Shop together in 2017.
“The best thing about being an owner of a candy shop is getting my favorite holiday candy in June,” the I Love You, Man actor wrote on the establishment’s website. Yeager, for her part, penned, “The magic of Samuel’s, especially during the holidays, makes me feel like a little girl again.”
Despite their sugary-sweet romance, the pair admittedly have their fair share of ups and downs. In fact, Rudd told the Jewish Journal in 2012 that his hit movie, This Is 40, was partially inspired by arguments between him and his wife.
“[Director] Judd [Apatow] had said, ‘Let’s make a movie about marriage and the things that we fight about — kind of a real, warts and all view of it,’” Rudd — who stars alongside Apatow’s wife, Leslie Mann, in the film — told the outlet. “When Judd was writing that movie, my wife once said, ‘I’m so sick of looking at your back,’ because I was just on the computer all day, checking my fantasy football scores.”
Ultimately, however, Rudd and Yaeger’s favorite way to spend time is at home with their children.
For his 51st birthday — which the family celebrated during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic — Yaeger, son Jack and daughter Darby went all out with a small party at home.
“We made him a little scavenger hunt and made him walk all around the house,” Yaeger explained on a 2020 episode of Friday Night in With the Morgans, adding, “We made him go up and down the stairs and in each little spot there was a Post-It telling him the next place to go.”
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Keep scrolling for a complete timeline of Rudd and Yeager’s relationship: