Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke‘s love story was anything but fiction.
It started on the set of their 1997 movie Gattaca. “Have you ever played Spin the Bottle?” Hawke asked in a cover story for GQ Hype released Sept. 1. “There’s a certain intimacy to the work that we do. Imaginative intimacy. It’s such a high. It feels dangerous and thrilling. It turns the temperature up in your life. It can be like falling in love at summer camp. It doesn’t have any connection to the dailiness of real life. That’s the danger of it.”
Add in the aspect of going through all of it in the public eye and, “it’s humiliating,” the Dead Poets Society star continued about dealing with the headlines generated throughout their romance. “It’s almost humiliating even when they’re saying positive things.”
Hawke, 54, and Thurman, 55, wed in May 1998, six years after her divorce from Gary Oldman. Though the Predestination actor suspects the role of husband is one he shouldn’t have taken on at the time.
“Success when you’re young is really overwhelming,” Hawke, who was 27 when he and Thurman exchanged vows, admitted to ELLE in 2013. “The world felt out of control. And I wanted to stop it from spinning so fast. I thought marriage would decrease my variables or something. I was absolutely wrong. There was this discovery that the male brain isn’t done until 28. I definitely think my frontal lobe was not finished. I had no business taking vows that would last more than two weeks.”
And yet two months after they exchanged those words, their relationship was cemented with the arrival of daughter Maya Hawke, 27. Son Levon Hawke, 23, joined the family in 2002.
But as their stars rose—with Hawke receiving his first Oscar nomination for Training Day in 2002, months before Thurman released Kill Bill: Vol. 1—their marriage crumbled.
As news broke of their split in 2003, Hawke found himself slamming speculation that he’d been unfaithful while filming a movie in Montreal.
“Uma and I did not split up over anybody’s infidelity,” he told 20/20 in 2004. “We had a lot of problems before I ever went to Montreal.”
Instead, the Before Sunset alum attributed the breakdown of their marriage to their careers.
“It is very difficult for any couple who are married if both people are very ambitious…And our love got beaten up,” he continued, per the New York Post. “I don’t know if it’s just too hard to be married to a woman that wants to be a movie star. I know that she has that right to want that.”
Finalizing their divorce in 2005 was “excruciating,” Thurman has said.
“You bear two children with somebody. That’s not a small thing,” the Pulp Fiction star explained on a 2005 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show. “And then you can hardly talk to them. And you need to, and your children need you to, so you work on it. And he’s made an effort, and I try to make an effort.”
While Thurman echoed Hawke’s sentiments that their careers played a part in the dissolve of their union, she suggested it didn’t come down to just one thing.
“We were going through a really bad time,” the Dangerous Liaisons actress added. “My son was 18 months old. I hadn’t really worked very much between my children, which had given us a lot of stability. I had a child and went back into an incredibly demanding job. I think that put a huge amount of pressure on our marriage. You put your children first and then you get very busy. I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”
Besides, she continued, “Blaming anybody doesn’t make you feel better. When you have two children, I think that’s such a priority to protect them and to never lose sight of the fact that, even if you’re in a fight or even if things are going badly, it’s in their best interest that everybody comes out OK.”
In 2008, Hawke remarried—this time tying the knot with his family’s former nanny Ryan Shawhughes. Though he was careful to note that their romance (the two have since welcomed daughters Clementine Hawke, 17, and Indiana Hawke, 14) didn’t start until a year after he and Thurman split.
“I know people imagine some kind of Sound Of Music type love affair,” Hawke told The Guardian in 2009, “but the truth is by the time Ryan and I were falling in love, it had been a long while since I had employed her.”
Thurman grew her family as well, adding daughter Luna Thurman-Busson, now 13, during her relationship with former fiancé Arpad Busson, which ended in 2014.
And while the tabloids have had plenty to say about her and Hawke’s marriage, the Oscar nominees have made a point not to speak ill of each other.
“She’s my children’s mother,” he told People in 2006. “You have to keep that above anything else. If you bring two people into the world together, that supersedes anything else.”
To see more stars who struck up a romance on set, keep reading.
Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes
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.”
Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton
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.”
Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos
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.
Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly
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.”
Kit Harington and Rose Leslie
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.
Macaulay Culkin and Brenda Song
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: DakotaSong Culkin and Carson Song Culkin.
Sarah Shahi and Adam Demos
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.
Emily VanCamp and Josh Bowman
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.”
Sister Rio Rose joined the family in March 2024.
Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick
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.
Jared Padalecki and Genevieve Cortese
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.
Josh Dallas and Ginnifer Goodwin
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.”
Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys
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.
Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn
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 Russell and Meredith Hagner
Talk about following in your parents’ footsteps.
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.
Kate Mara and Jamie Bell
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.
Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara
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.
Ryan Bingham and Hassie Harrison
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.
Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer
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.
Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen
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.”
Grace Van Patten and Jackson White
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!
