Molly McNearney recalled the moment she knew her now-husband — and then-boss — Jimmy Kimmel “wanted to f–k.”
The writer was eight years into working at “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” when someone asked everyone to share their five favorite foods during a meeting, she detailed on Monday’s episode of the “Armchair Expert” podcast.
McNearney “rattled off, ‘Pizza and gnocchi, crab claws, BLT and chocolate chip cookies,’” all of which Kimmel cooked for her six months later.
“Talk about a long play,” the now-48-year-old quipped. “I go to Jimmy’s house, he asks me to come over after work … and he opens up the door and it smells delicious and he’s like, ‘I made some things,’ and it was pizza and gnocchi, crab claws, chocolate chop cookies and BLT.”
Podcast host Dax Shepard asked whether McNearney “immediately register[ed] that as, ‘Oh, he wants to f–k.’”
The producer replied, “Yes! It made me very excited and very nervous. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, no. This is a bad idea.’ He was my boss.”
When Kimmel, 58, noted that he “didn’t have that thought at the time,” his partner clapped back, “The person in power usually doesn’t, but I was very nervous about it. I thought it was a terrible idea. … I was very skittish.”
She explained, “I just kept thinking statistically this is not going to work out and your life isn’t going to change but mine does. And that’s what freaked me out. Because I had worked really really hard.”
At the time, the duo did “some sneaking” for a “little bit” before going public with their romance.
“The first few months, we were very very quiet,” McNearney recalled. “I was very nervous about it changing the work dynamic and I was in a room of mostly men and we had a great thing going on … and I didn’t want it to change.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Shepard and co-host Monica Padman asked the couple, who have been married since 2013 and share two children, for their “meet-cute story.”
“I met him a couple weeks into working at the show,” McNearney remembered. “I went into the office with the executive producer at the time. … I don’t think Jimmy even looked up from his desk [when I was introduced to him].”
The producer told Kimmel that McNearney did triathlons, to which the comedian replied, “How stupid.”
“That was it,” McNearney told listeners, insisting she did not “look at him [in a romantic] way at all” and was “intimidated” before, years later, “really lov[ing]” the “great guy” as she got to know him.
The duo got engaged in 2012 and walked down the aisle the following year in Baja, California.
They have since welcomed daughter Jane, now 12, and son Billy, now 9.
Kimmel, additionally, is the father of Catherine “Katie,” 34, and Kevin, 32, from his first marriage to Gina Kimmel, which lasted from 1988 to 2002.
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