Paul Thomas Anderson's movies are all about dysfunctional relationships, egomaniacal artists, fizzling dreams and people caught in predicaments requiring drastic measures to get out of.

So, it's no surprise that home with partner Maya Rudolph is a respite for the 56-year-old, who finally is no longer only a bridesmaid after winning Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars in March for One Battle After Another, which closed out the night being named Best Picture.

And Rudolph was there to see her longtime love triumph after his 11 previous Academy Award nominations over the course of his distinguished career were for naught.

Yet while the Saturday Night Live alum has also stolen scenes in Anderson's Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza, they are the opposite of a Hollywood couple. And not least because Rudolph, who's turning 54 on July 27, was most recently busy tearing up the scenery making her Broadway debut in Tony winner Oh, Mary!, on the opposite coast.

In fact, hearing they had been dubbed celebrity royalty in 2018 made Anderson, as he told the Los Angeles Times, "quite nervous." Yet he had a big laugh at a paparazzi photo he was unaware had been taken when they were on their way to a doctor's appointment, calling it "horrifying
but hilarious."

"I remember seeing that," he quipped, "thinking, 'Wow. There’s no way we could look like that, is there?'"

Anderson and Rudolph aren't against step-and-repeats, but they haven't made every red carpet a date night during the 20-plus years they've been together. (Though, perhaps sensing the inevitability of this awards season, she attended more events than usual with him in support of One Battle After Another.)

When Rudolph spotted Anderson and their kids in the audience when she opened in Oh, Mary! in April, “I went bananas," she told the New York Times. "It was so overwhelming."

Meanwhile, at home in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, where Anderson grew up and plans to never leave, the couple are first and foremost parents to Pearl, 20, Lucille, 16, Jack, 15, and Minnie, 12, their youngest—who turns 13 on Aug. 1—named after Rudolph's late mom, singer Minnie Riperton.

"It’s pretty Von Trapp," Anderson told the LA Times in 2018. "I don’t know that movie that well. But there’s a scene in You Can’t Take It with You where a woman enters and there’s 50 different family members all banging away on different things in different parts of the house. It’s a little like that. This one’s banging on the piano. This one’s banging on the drum. This one’s singing. It’s very chaotic."

As for staying put in the SFV for most of his life, he explained, "My memories are strong here and I like seeing my kids have memories here as well."

Whether or not their musically inclined brood pursue acting for the long run, all four kids made their big screen debut in 2021's Licorice Pizza, while Pearl also played Sister Coco (of the Brave Beaver order) in One Battle After Another.

Rudolph, who's originally from Florida, left SNL when Pearl was 2, tired of commuting between New York and L.A.

“It was too hard,” the still-in-demand impressionist told the New York Times in 2018. “And nobody else understands or cares, when they don’t have kids. They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cool...What are you guys doing tonight?’ They’re like, ‘We’re going to see Justin Timberlake because Andy’s doing “Dick in a Box” with him! What are you doing?’ And I was like [faraway stare] 'My daughter’s sick. I’m going home.'"

As a mom of four, the idea of being able to be everywhere all at once became even more absurd, but the Loot actress eventually figured out that, so long as her kids were always loved and cared for, she could work and not feel too terrible about being away.

“I make sure that it’s the best possible scenario,” Rudolph told People in 2019. “And I [started] feeling less guilty because I’m proud of the family I created in order to raise healthy, incredible people.”

And count Rudolph and Anderson among the successful love matches that SNL has wrought, the pair meeting at an after-party in 2001.

"He said he saw me in a sketch and said, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry,’” Rudolph told Town & Country in 2024. “But I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Maybe he just told me that to be sweet.”

That's basically the story, however. Anderson is a huge comedy fan and, when he got his chance to shoot his shot with the queen, he didn't miss.

"I had met Molly Shannon," he said on a 2022 episode of SmartLess, "and she said, 'You know, you could come and you can see how we do this.' And at the time I was writing Punch-Drunk Love and I was obsessed with the time that [Adam Sandler] had been there, so I accepted the offer to
watch behind the scenes."

Anderson spent a week at SNL, also directing a short, and when he was getting ready to leave, "My head was spinning," he recalled. "That was great, but I don't want to f--king do that again because it was so much."

But then someone gave him a piece of paper that happened to note that one Maya Rudolph would be joining the cast the following week.

"I can remember seeing her name on that piece of paper," he told Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes. "I don't know if you've had any feeling like this, but you see something for the first time and you realize that my life has just changed. I don't know how, I don't know why."

"Looking back," he noted, "obviously that kind of impulse, that shining kind of feeling that can happen to any of us if we're open to it, happened. So, I roamed around and then I saw her on television and I saw what she was doing. And I stayed in touch with a few people from the show and I was like, 'My God, this woman's amazing.'"

He returned to the set and they met, but then he had to go to London to start filming Punch-Drunk Love. When he got there, "I said, 'Well, something didn't feel right,' and I just came back to New York."

After which he asked her out and they've been together ever since.

They've yet to officially get married, but they refer to each other as husband and wife, Rudolph telling the NY Times it felt "ooky" to call Anderson her boyfriend once they became parents.

"People know what [husband] means," she explained. "It means he’s the father of my child, and I live with him, and we are a couple, and we are not going anywhere.”

See more celebrities who found love on set, whether they were working together or not:

No stranger to dating co-stars after romances with Sandra Bullock and Rachel McAdams, Gosling fell for Mendes on the set of The Place Beyond the Pines. But the pair have managed to keep their relationship private since they began dating in 2013.

The couple have since welcomed two daughters, Esmeralda and Amada and Mendes opened up about how ending up with The Notebook star changed her opinion on motherhood. 

"I was lucky enough to work my bum off for 20 years," the New York & Company designer said on Sydney's Nova 96.9 in October 2020. "I never wanted babies before until I fell in love with Ryan, and then it just kind of worked out to where I was 40 and having my first baby and then I think I was 42 with my second one, so it worked out in that way that I had a career and then I changed my focus to my family."

And she's not ruling out a future on-screen collaboration with Gosling. 

"I really want to work with Ryan again. My most fun experience was being on set with him when he was directing," she told E! News. "It was really so creatively satisfying being in it together and he's such an amazing director. I would love that experience again, for sure."

The singers, who met on the set of The Voice, have been nearly inseparable ever since they first started dating back in November 2015.

While Shelton and Stefani both admitted that they had initially bonded over the ending of their respective marriages, it seems as though their love affair had lasting power from the get-go.

In an interview with Billboard, Shelton recalled falling head over heels for the singer and how the two ultimately helped each other through their heartache. "Gwen saved my life," he said. "Who else on earth could understand going through a high-profile divorce from another musician?"

After five years of dating, Shelton popped the question in October 2020 and the couple got married in an intimate ceremony in July 2021.

According to Carson Daly, who officiated their wedding, the nuptials were "a perfect blend of country and glamour."

"It was as elegant and refined and cool as Gwen is, and it was country and down-home and fun as Blake is," he told Today, adding, "They just work. They're an unlikely pair. They're like if you paired delicious fried chicken with a glass of champagne. On paper, on the menu, it doesn't seem to work, but it works. They're comfort food with class, and everybody roots for that."

The beloved couple first met in 1995 when they played love interests on the popular soap opera All My Children. The morning talk show personality and the Riverdale star then eloped to Las Vegas on May 1, 1996.

Consuelos knew "pretty early on" Ripa was the one for him, once telling Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live, "We would go out with groups of people from work and slowly each date would go that the groups started getting smaller and smaller until it was just us two. I was shy, I wasn't very aggressive that way."

But Ripa revealed the couple almost split before their wedding.

"We broke up and we got back together the day before we went off and eloped," she detailed on the Comments By Celebs podcast in 2018. "Yeah, we eloped. We went to Vegas and got married."

Nearly three decades and three children later, their marriage is still going strong. And, in a full-circle moment, Ripa and Consuelos are sharing the screen together as Live cohosts.

From the moment the Jennifer's Body star met the rapper born Colson Baker on their shared movie set in 2020, she knew their relationship was destined to become what she called a "once in a lifetime" romance.

Chatting with their Midnight in the Switchgrass director Randall Emmett on his and his then-fiancée Lala Kent's podcast in July 2020, Fox recalled inquiring who was going to fill the empty chair on set. "And [Emmett] was like, 'Oh, we just got Machine Gun Kelly,'" she said, "and immediately, I was like, 'Uh oh.' Because I knew, I could feel that some wild s--t was going to happen to me from that meeting but I wasn't sure what. I just felt it in my solar plexus that something was going to come from that."

Fox, who quietly separated from husband of nine years and father of their three children Brian Austin Green in late 2019, went on to call MGK her "twin flame," explaining they were more than soul mates. 

They weren't shy about showing their love for one another: Fox starred in Kelly's music video, they got tattoos to mark their romance and made their red carpet debut as a couple before getting engaged in January 2022. 

And while they've since split up, they welcomed daughter Saga Blade Fox-Baker in March 2025 and have been coparenting.

“Megan is a great mom,” MGK said on a June 2025 episode of Today. “She’s killing it. I’m so excited.”

Just as his character Jon Snow couldn't resist falling for Ygritte, Harington fell in love with his Game of Thrones co-star after she joined the HBO fantasy series in its second season. In an interview with Vogue Italia, he recalled shooting those episodes as his favorite memory from the show.

"Because the country is beautiful, because the Northern Lights are magical, and because it was there that I fell in love," he said. "If you're already attracted to someone, and then they play your love interest in the show, it becomes very easy to fall in love."

While their onscreen romance proved ill-fated, Harington and Leslie got married in June 2018 and have since welcomed two children whose names have not been made public. 

The Home Alone actor and the former Disney Channel star met making 2019's Changeland and their romance surprised their director Seth Green, who told Esquire, "I didn't see that one coming." 

Song explained to Entertainment Tonight that they bonded over their shared backgrounds as child actors. "You just look each other in the eye and you nod and we know," she said. 

Engaged since 2022, the couple have two children: Dakota Song Culkin and Carson Song Culkin.

The couple met on the set of Netflix's Sex/Life, in which they play angsty former couple Billie and Brad, so it's no wonder those intimate scenes are so steamy: Shahi and Demos went public with their romance in December 2020, with fans loving their adorable displays of affection on social media.

And mixing business and pleasure was easy for the couple, with Shahi telling E! News that working with her boyfriend is "one of her favorite things." As she put it, Adam is one of her "all-time favorite scene partners."

"With him, it's just that easy," she explained. "I just have to look at him and 99 percent of my work is done for me. I'm falling in love with the person in real life, but I'm falling for the person on camera. It just created that extra bit that seeped through the lens. Maybe that's what people loved so much."But in April 2025, reports spread that the pair split.

While their characters' love story didn't have a happy ending on ABC's Revenge, VanCamp and Bowman tied the knot on Dec. 15, 2018, and have been together for more than a decade. 

In August 2021, the couple announced the birth of their first child together. "Welcome to the world our sweet little Iris," VanCamp wrote on Instagram, revealing their baby girl's name. "Our hearts are full."

The two met on the set of the 1988 PBS movie Lemon Sky and married later that year. And after decades together, they're considered one of Hollywood's strongest relationships. Bacon and Sedgwick are parents to two children—son Travis Bacon, a composer, and daughter Sosie Bacon, who is also an actress.

And the hunter fell for the irresistible demon—both on and off screen.

Padalecki and Cortese hit it off when she joined Supernatural in its fourth season as Ruby. And after a two-month engagement, they tied the knot in her hometown of Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2010, with his TV bro Jensen Ackles serving as one of the groomsmen.

The couple, who once again co-starred on the CW's Walker with Cortese playing his character's dead wife in flashbacks, have have three children, sons Thomas, Austin, and daughter Odette.

It was a fairy tale romance for Dallas and Goodwin when they co-starred on ABC's fantasy hit Once Upon a Time, playing Prince Charming and Snow White, of course.

"It hit me like a blinding light," Dallas told People in 2012. "I thought, 'I'm in trouble now.'"

As for Goodwin, she knew Dallas was the one when they went on their first date to Disneyland.

"I knew that in fact I was going to marry my husband Josh at Disneyland because I took him for his first time ever and we had just started dating," Goodwin would later detail to Kelly Ripa. "We were on Big Thunder Mountain and he threw his arms in the air and he goes, 'This is the best day of my life' and I was like, 'We're totally getting married.'"

He popped the question in October 2013 and they tied the knot in April 2014. Dallas and Goodwin are the parents of sons Oliver and Hugo and the Manifest star is hoping to work with his wife again after their six-year stint on OUAT.

"She's the greatest. I miss working with her every day," he said on Live with Kelly and Ryan. "I think she was like, 'look, we've worked together and we've lived together six years, give me a break.' But I think we'll work together again, I hope so."

It wasn't exactly love at first sight for The Americans co-stars when they met 10 years before."We actually met a very long long time ago," he confessed on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen. "I very drunkenly asked her for her number when she was a young, single, slip of a thing, so I sort of knew then when I was 26."

But a decade and plenty of wigs later, Rhys and Russell quietly began dating in 2014 while playing married KGB spies. They welcomed their first child together, son Sam, in May 2016. Russell also has two children from her previous marriage, son River Deary and daughter Willa Deary.

While they recently teamed up to play Santa and Mrs. Claus for Netflix's The Christmas Chronicles, the beloved Hollywood pair first met on the set of 1968's The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band.

But they didn't fall for each other until reconnecting while filming 1984's Swing Shift, despite Hawn telling BBC News, "We both said we would never go out with another actor." The couple went on to star in the 1988 rom-com Overboard.

Partners for over 40 years, Russell and Hawn share son Wyatt Russell in addition to each having children from prior relationships, Oliver and Kate Hudson and Boston Russell.

Asked their secret for working well with each other, Russell quipped to E! News, "Do it every 33 years, first of all!"

Wyatt, the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, fell for Hagner after they met while working on the 2016 movie Folk Hero & Funny Guy. Later, the two would go on to appear together in Ingrid Goes West.

After getting engaged in 2018, the couple wed the following year at Goldie's house in Aspen. "It was Western themed and everyone came in cowboy hats and boots," a source shared with E! News at the time. "It was a big casual gathering of family and friends that lasted all weekend."

Russell and Hanger welcomed their son Buddy Prine Russell in November 2021, and brother Boone Joseph Russell joined the family in February 2024.

Well, at least one good thing came out of the universally panned Fantastic Four reboot in 2014.

Mara and Bell fell for each other on the set of the superhero flick, though they didn't spark dating rumors until they were spotted holding hands at a Met Gala after-party in May 2015.

After their July 2017 wedding, Bell gushed  to E! News, "It feels like we've been married for years. In the best way. We're having a great time."

In May 2019, Mara revealed the couple welcomed their first child. "We had a baby a couple weeks ago..." the A Teacher star wrote on Instagram. "Here are her feet." In November 2022, Mara and Bell announced the birth of their second child in similar fashion: "Had a baby a week ago," Mara shared on Instagram. "Here are his feet." Bell also shares son Jack Bell with ex-wife Evan Rachel Wood.

Kate isn't the only Mara sister to find love on a film set.

In 2013, Phoenix and Mara proved their enviable chemistry when they co-starred in the Oscar-nominated film Her. They then shared the screen in the 2018 biblical drama Mary Magdalene, and according to reports, the couple first realized their attraction to one another while filming the project a year prior in Italy.

The private pair made their red carpet debut at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and quietly got engaged in 2019. And, while accepting the Oscar for Best Actor, The Joker star got emotional while giving Mara a shout-out. Wiping away tears, he told his partner, "I love you."

In September 2020, director Victor Kossakovsky revealed at the Zurich Film Festival that the couple had welcomed a baby boy. He also confirmed that the couple's son was named River, seemingly in honor of Joaquin's late brother River Phoenix, who passed away in 1993 at the age of 23. 

Yellowstone fans were twirling their lassos with glee when the co-stars confirmed their relationship with a fiery photo posted to Bingham's Instagram in April 2022. In the post, the two were seen sharing a kiss in front of an open flame, with the actor captioning their PDA post, "More than a spark." As for Harrison's reaction? She commented, "I love you, cowboy." They continue to ride together as husband and wife.

It was love at first bite for the couple, who began dating while filming the first season of HBO's True Blood in 2008. 

"There's no one I'd rather work with," Moyer told E! News in 2009. "I love working with her and that's how it all started, by falling in love on camera."

They announced their engagement a year later and tied the knot in August 2010. Moyer and Paquin welcomed twins, Poppy and Charlie, in 2012.

Each having a failed marriage behind them, neither star was looking for love when they arrived on the set of Pontiac Moon in 1993.

"I announced to all my friends—not dramatically, but very seriously—that I was done with relationships," Steenburgen told Closer. But the pair fell for each other while playing husband and wife, with Danson revealing they bonded during a scene in a canoe.

"We paddled in sync," Danson said. "We went out as friends and by the time we came back, we were in love... Ironic how life works in those moments. Once you throw up your arms and surrender, a lot of times things come your way."

In October 2020, the couple celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary, with the Book Club actress gushing to Closer, "I'm ridiculously in love with him. I find him endlessly fascinating. He surprises me all the time and most of all he makes me laugh."

The Good Place actor admitted in the same interview, "I get nervous around her because I want to impress her—I am the luckiest."

After viewers binged the Hulu drama Tell Me Lies, they couldn't help but wonder if Van Patten and White's onscreen chemistry had trickled over into real-life, with the pair fully playing into their are-they-or-aren't-they dynamic in interviews and on social media. Eventually, fans got the answer: No, we're not fibbing, the problematic onscreen pair is together in real-life and, fortunately, toxin-free.

White confirmed their romance with several photobooth snaps from the 2022 CFDA Awards, including a picture of the co-star couple kissing. He then posted a photo of himself and Van Patten touching tongues with the caption, "if we kiss can we get a s2 @hulu." Spoiler alert: It worked!