Leslie Bibb and Sam Rockwell: A Love Story That Started at Chateau Marmont

Long before Leslie Bibb was checking into the White Lotus, she was checking out Sam Rockwell in the lobby of Chateau Marmont.

The actress remembered a chance encounter she had with her husband at Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show in 2007. She was having dinner with friends when someone waved at her from behind, and it turned out to be him (the Oscar winner). When she saw him, she felt a spark. Despite being hesitant due to some previous failed relationships, including a brief marriage to an investment banker in 2004, Leslie was going through therapy and had been avoiding dating. However, she decided to give it another try and focus on finding out why she kept choosing the wrong partners.

Turns out Leslie was just biding her time ’til she crossed paths with Mr. Right.

She recalled saying, “I’m all set to head out. Shall we go out? We’re about to have dinner,” to her companions. And it was the very first person I encountered.

Leslie and Sam went on their first date about a week later to a museum. Although, the Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri actor had scheduled a “backup date” with someone else after their outing.

“It’s true,” he said on a February 2024 episode of The Drew Barrymore Show. “She loves to remind me of that.”

But when Leslie suggested they grab drinks after their day date and Sam told her there were a few things he had to take care of first, she figured out his plan.

“She caught me,” he continued, “but then we went and got margaritas and salsa and chips.”

Still, Leslie was initially serving up some noncommittal vibes.

“I was trying to be like a badass and be like, ‘Listen, I wanna lease, not own,'” the Miss Nobody star recounted in her Rosie Show interview. “‘I’m not really looking for anything right now.'”

However, she couldn’t deny their bond.

“I think three weeks later,” she admitted, “I was like, ‘I love you so much.'”

Of course, the feeling is mutual.

“She’s my beloved,” Sam raved to Us Weekly in 2018. “She keeps me laughing and we take care of each other. She’s really talented and funny herself. She reminds me of a young Mary Tyler Moore.”

Throughout the past nearly 18 years, the two have been costars in both life and work—appearing alongside each other in movies like Iron Man 2 and Don Verdean. However, they don’t need to tie the knot to show they’re committed to each other.

After all, Sam told The London Evening Standard in 2022, he and Leslie are “basically married. She’s in my will. I feel like we are married. We live like a married couple. I’m really proud of her.”

As for the secret to their long-lasting partnership?

“Communication,” Sam told TopMob News at the 2018 SAG Awards, with Leslie then adding, “Good sex” and a “healthy sense of humor.”

Of course, Leslie isn’t the only one from The White Lotus cast with a love story fans like to play on repeat as much as the show’s theme song. Check out the rest of her costars’ sweet stories.

While Jason Isaacs‘ character Timothy Ratliff is married to Parker Posey‘s Victoria Ratliff on The White Lotus, his wife IRL is Emma Hewitt.

“Without her,” he wrote in 2020’s The Big Issue, “there is no me that I recognize or would want to know.”

Jason met the former documentary filmmaker at the University of London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in the ’80s. At this point, he was battling what he called a “decades-long love affair with drugs,” which ended in 1998 when he became sober.

“When I got clean, I remember my wife saying, OK, at last, we can finally buy a home and we can have kids and get on with our lives,” Jason added. “And I said, actually, darling, I’ve just met you. What are you talking about? She said, we’ve been together for 10 years! I know, I said, and I’m really sorry, but I feel like I’ve just been born, and we have to date and get to know each other.”

When he later asked “why she’d want to be with someone who was just out of their head the entire time,” he continued, she said, “she always loved who I really was and who I really could be.”

The couple wed in 2001 and welcomed daughters Lily and Ruby.“She decided she was going to give up a very successful career and follow me around and live, with nothing to do, in these far-flung places, and not really feel like part of the crew, in order to get pregnant,” Jason told The Guardian in 2008. “It took us a while and we had IVF, which worked first time for us both times.”

Fans have been seeing, um, a lot of Patrick Schwarzenegger on The White Lotus, but he’s been baring his soul to fiancée Abby Champion for a decade.

“It was 2015!” the model recalled to The Daily Front Row nine years after her meet-cute with the actor, who plays Ratliff son Saxon on the HBO drama. “We met through a mutual friend who I was on a date with and Patrick knew. We’re thankful for him because he introduced us and that led to us getting married.”

While they’re not married yet, Patrick proposed to Abby on the beach in December 2023 and revealed to GQ last September they’re planning a 2025 wedding.

“As I’ve learned, the role is just to make sure that she’s happy, just whatever she wants to do,” the eldest son of exes Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver told the magazine. “I’m happy to give my opinion on things, and otherwise I’m just there to support her and make it so that she has the best day that she wants. That’s really my job.”

For now, they’re happy with their relationship status as each other’s No. 1 fans.

“So proud of the human you are,” Patrick wrote in an Instagram tribute for Abby’s birthday in February. “You continue to inspire me. I love watching your dedication to your family, friends, faith and your work. It’s been a blessing to be on this journey with you & I can’t wait to watch where life takes us.”

Wondering how Sam Nivola and Iris Apatow met? No, it wasn’t through, as he once joked to British Vogue, “some secret cabal of nepo kids who hang out in black robes.”

Though we like the idea of his parents—actors Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola—and hers—Leslie Mann and Judd Apatow—playing matchmaker, it was a mutual friend who was responsible for their pairing.

As he recalled to Teen Vogue in February, Sam (who portrays Saxon’s younger brother Lochlan on The White Lotus) and Iris were introduced by their pal Isa Barrett at a London bar. While The Perfect Couple alum said he tried to shoot his shot with The Bubble actress, she was in a relationship at the time and “was not having it.”

But after Iris’ romance ended, Sam decided to see if they could give dating another go. They made their relationship Instagram in the spring of 2024 and have since moved in together.

“I’m so in love, and she’s so amazing,” Sam told Teen Vogue. “I think the thing about moving in with someone is that when you’re this young, it’s always like, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to get sick of them.’ You’re going to spend all day, every day together, and then it’s going to be routine, and you’re going to feel like you’ve been in a marriage for 30 years. I don’t think that would happen with her anyway, just because we’re so in love.”

Leslie Bibb‘s love story with Sam Rockwell didn’t start at the White Lotus in Thailand, but in the lobby of Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood.

“I was standing there about to have dinner with some girlfriends and somebody looked over my shoulder and waved,” the actress, who plays Kate (one of three friends on a girls’ trip), recalled of the 2007 meeting on The Rosie Show. “I turned around, and it was him. He was walking behind me. He was staying there because he was doing Frost/Nixon.”

And the chemistry was instant.

“He smiled at me and I thought, ‘Oh no, what’s that?'” she continued. “Sometimes you just get struck.”

Leslie and Sam went on their first date about a week later. And while the Talladega Nights alum said she intially tried to make it seem like she wasn’t interested in a serious relationship with the Oscar winner, she couldn’t hide her true feelings.

“I was like, ‘I’m really not into anything,'” she added, “and then I think three weeks later, I was like, ‘I love you so much.'”

Fast-forward to today, and the couple, who’ve never married, is still going strong.

“Sweet sixteen sammy…” Leslie wrote on Instagram alongside a throwback photo of her and Sam for their October 2023 anniversary, “was this from the first year, maybe the second, who knows we were babies and all the time is flying by and blurring into one helluva a ride with you…I feel very lucky to get to love this human and even luckier to be loved by him.”

While The White Lotus‘ Jaclyn Lemon gossips about her friends behind their backs, Michelle Monaghan has nothing but positive things to say about her husband Pete White.

And she’ll never forget his support when she filmed a steamy scene with Tom Cruise for Mission: Impossible III right after the couple wed in 2005.

“I had just gotten married and kind of skipped my honeymoon to start the film right away,” Michelle recalled to Collider in 2023. “Then I remember going to work, and Tom and I had kind of an intimate scene, and of course that was the first scene. Then I came home from work, I was so nervous, and my husband was like, ‘Don’t worry, you’re gonna follow his lead. You’re gonna have a great time. It’s going to be wonderful.'”

After the scene went well, Pete was thrilled.

“He goes, ‘How cool is it that you were making out with Tom Cruise on our honeymoon?'” Michelle remembered. “Because we’re just such fans.”

As she noted, “That is a testament to the man that I married, who has just been totally supportive and is excited and jazzed for the opportunities.”

And no matter what mission they face in life—including raising kids Willow and Tommy—The Family Plan star and the entrepreneur do it together.

“My husband and I check in with each other weekly on Sundays,” she told Lifeminute in 2017, “and we ask each other, ‘What are your priorities for this week? What can I help you achieve or make time for you to do, whether it’s personal time or time achieving our own goals?'”

Though Carrie Coon‘s character Laurie goes on a trip to Thailand with friends Kate and Jaclyn on The White Lotus, the actress’ real BFF is her husband Tracy Letts.

She met the playwright in 2010 while they were working on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Tracy winning a Tony Award for his performance as George and Carrie receiving a nomination for her portrayal of Honey.

Three years later, they tied the knot. Although, the ceremony didn’t exactly go according to plan.

“My wedding was in a hospital after my emergency gallbladder surgery,” Tracy told Vanity Fair in 2013. “We were going to go to the courthouse to get married, and the night before, I suddenly came down with pains. We went to the emergency room, and I had my gallbladder removed the next day. So she went and she found the Lutheran chaplain there in the hospital, who had never performed a wedding before, who came to our hospital room and performed the ceremony there. So it was a lovely, intimate, personal ceremony. We had a great time.”

In 2018, Carrie and Tracy welcomed son Haskell, and a daughter (whose name has not been publicly revealed) arrived three years later.

And the two stars are still going strong. After an interview led to rumors of an open marriage, Carrie shut down the speculation.

“Settle down, internet!” she wrote on X Feb. 25. “I said ‘open minded’ not ‘open.'”

Walton Goggins can thank one of his friends for introducing him to wife Nadia Conners.

As the actor once recalled on The View, his pal overheard the director chatting with her buddies at an L.A. restaurant in 2005 and insisted she come to a dinner the next night to meet Walton.

Walton was attending the dinner to raise money for a movie, he continued, and thought Nadia was one of the business associates.

“We go and we sit down at this table, and she literally takes her chair and turns her back against everybody at the table and she says, ‘Well, tell me about you,'” he continued. “I said, ‘Oh well, I’m just trying to raise money for this movie.’ And no, she said, ‘I want to know about you.'”

Walton and Nadia spent the entire dinner learning each other’s stories.

“I didn’t talk to anyone there that I was supposed to talk to,” he admitted. “At the end of it, she said, ‘You’re gonna take me home, right?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And then when I got her home, she said, ‘You’re going to ask for my number right?’ And I said, ‘Of course I am.'”

Walton and Nadia welcomed son Augustus in 2011 and wed that same year (he was previously married to Leanne Goggins).

“I love you both beyond measure,” the TV star, who plays Rick Hatchett opposite Aimee Lou Wood‘s Chelsea on The White Lotus, wrote in a February Instagram message to his family. “More than I could hope for and certainly more than I deserve.”

Sorry, Gaitok! While Tayme Thapthimthong‘s character has feelings for Lisa‘s Mook on The White Lotus, the Blackpink star appears to already be in a relationship with French businessman Frédéric Arnault.

Though the two haven’t commented on the romance rumors, they’ve been sparking dating speculation for a while.

Back in November 2022, Frédéric posted photos of himself attending a Blackpink concert. Since then, social media users have spotted the former TAG Heuer CEO and the actress hanging out and traveling together. While he’s caught a number of her shows and attended a few premieres, she’s turned up at the 2024 TAG Heuer Formula 1 Kith Launch Celebration.

And for those keeping watch, in her song “Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me),” Lisa also mentions how a “green-eyed French boy got me trippin’.”

Arnas Fedaravicius‘ character Valentin may be single, but he’s fully looked in on Emeraude Toubia in real life.

More than a year after announcing her divorce from Prince Royce in March 2022, the Shadowhunters actress and the White Lotus star appeared to make their relationship Instagram official in 2023.

Aside from the occasional pic on the ‘gram, Arnas and Emeraude have kept much of their romance private. However, she did join him for filming of the show in Thailand.

“From one amazing moment to the next!” the With Love alum wrote on Instagram in January. “So proud of you, @arnasfederman! Thank you for bringing me along on this unforgettable ride.”

Pam will want to take your phone after you check into the White Lotus.

However, the actress who plays her, Morgana O’Reilly, wasn’t against using her device to post this sweet photo of her and husband Peter Salmon.

While they’re both graduates of Unitec in New Zealand, the couple actually met for the first time in New York.

“It was crazy,” Morgana said in a 2022 interview for her alma mater’s website, “because we fell in love in New York City, were in the same industry and had so many friends in common yet had never really come across one another despite the similarities.”

They later married and welcomed kids Luna and Ziggy. But their family isn’t their only group project. In 2020, the Neighbours star and the director released the series Inside. And recently, they turned her stage show Stories About My Body into a film.

“Me and this guy just made a movie about our love story and the birth of our children (amongst other tales),” Morgana wrote on Instagram in August. “His talent blows my mind. The birth of this art baby has left me in awe of you all over again Mr. Salmon.”

Onscreen, Jon Gries‘ Greg Hunt was married to Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid until her character’s death in season two (RIP). Off-camera, the actor tied the knot recently—like, really recently.

In a March 4 video for Harper’s Bazaar, Jon revealed his fiancée, whose name he did not reveal, is now his wife “as of Friday,” letting it slip that one of the last things he Googled was probably directions to their courthouse ceremony.

Just maybe don’t honeymoon at the White Lotus.

2025-03-16 14:24

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