Zach Gilford and Liana Liberato are ringing in Valentine’s Day 2026 with plenty of PDA.
Liberato, 30, uploaded a photo seemingly kissing Gilford, 44, to her Instagram Stories on Saturday, February 14. The Stuck in Love actress dressed casually in a navy hoodie as she wrapped her arms around her boyfriend. Both of their heads were cropped out of the frame as they shared a smooch.
Liberato, who added an emoji of an envelope sealed with a heart to her post, later teased that she had another valentine beside Gilford.
“My valentine,” she captioned a follow-up Instagram Story slide of her black-and-white cat.
Us Weekly broke the news in November 2025 that Liberato and Gilford were dating after meeting on the set of Criminal Minds: Evolution.
“They started dating after they worked together,” a source told Us at the time, noting the pair’s romance was still “relatively new.”
Prior to finding love with Liberato, Gilford was married to Kiele Sanchez for 12 years. Gilford filed for divorce in April 2025, citing irreconcilable differences.Gilford and Sanchez, 48, share two kids and also work together on Criminal Minds.
“It’s actually harder,” Gilford exclusively told Us in 2024 of starring opposite his then-wife. “It’s harder because I don’t want to hold a gun to my wife’s head. … It just happened to be that the nature of these scenes were pretty gross. Honestly, all those scenes are so f***ed up. I’ll only speak for myself. Kiele can obviously speak for herself, but it felt gross [bringing those darker moments to life together].”
According to Gilford, he and Sanchez weren’t cast for Criminal Minds at the same time.
“I was on my way to work, and I said goodbye to Kiele. And she looked at her phone and said, ‘That’s weird. I just got an offer to play your wife on Criminal Minds,’” Gilford told Us. “Then, Erica [Messer, the showrunner] told me, ‘We didn’t want to put pressure on you or Kiele. We just wanted to make it very professional.’”
He continued at the time, “I think they were like, ‘Well, if Zach’s doing this then the only way we’ll get an actress of Kiele’s caliber to play this part is because she’s married to him. And it’ll be like a homie hookup.’ Once they got Kiele, they definitely leaned into it and they’re like, ‘Well, we have this actress so let’s write to her.’”
Gilford and Sanchez, who met on the set of 2010’s The Matadors, have also shared the screen on Kingdom and The Purge: Anarchy. Sanchez later wrote an episode of The Fall of the House of Usher, of which Gilford had a leading role.
“We’ve worked together several times and in very different situations,” Gilford recalled to Us in 2024. “But there’s a theme on set when you are coworkers but also a married couple. It’s kind of trying to walk that tightrope. There’s times where I want to [support her]. Like, if she’s having a discussion [with a director or a writer], I want to be like, ‘Yeah, Kiele is right!’ But that’s not my place. Kiele can talk for herself — she’s a very strong woman.”
As for Liberato, she has often kept her dating life private through the years.
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