Our marriage is a bit of a unicorn,” says Nick Offerman, who is releasing his fourth book, The Greatest Love Story Ever Told: An Oral History with his wife, Megan Mullally, this October. “In Hollywood years, we’ve been married 227 years. And that’s the impetus for the book, to say here is our pretty normal relationship with a couple of very fortunate life paths crossing.”
The couple met in 2000 when Mullally, at the height of her Will & Grace fame, was starring in a play; Offerman had a supporting role and made the scenery. The couple married in 2003. Chapters in The Greatest Love Story Ever Told give each of their perspectives on their courtship, including how he was infatuated with her at first sight; she was less impressed. It also covers their 12-year age difference, families, exes and all the banalities married couples talk about over jigsaw puzzles and audio books. “What people think a Hollywood marriage must be like to succeed versus how sort of substantive and old- fashioned we are is actually the secret,” says Offerman. “The secret is not to have a Hollywood marriage.”
Mullally came up with the book idea not long after starting on social media, when the comments section of her posted pictures with Nick quickly filled up with #couplegoals. Offerman, who has written three books on his own, including Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop and Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America’s Gutsiest Troublemakers, “didn’t necessarily cotton to the idea,” says Mullally, who was just nominated for an Emmy Award for the eighth time for her role as Karen Walker on Will & Grace. “He was like, ‘I just don’t understand what it would be,’ but I whittled away at him.”
Offerman and Mullally worked on the book’s nine chapters over the course of last year while they traveled across the country for her show Nancy and Beth, which costars Friday Night Lights actress Stephanie Hunt. (Offerman is famously the women’s beloved roadie.) “We would do one or two chapters at a time,” says Mullally. “We were always laying in bed, and for every chapter, a different bed. I think there was only one time where we were at home in our own bed.”
“We’re in the same bed, but different locations,” clarifies Offerman, who is costarring alongside Jon Hamm, Jeff Bridges and Chris Hemsworth in Bad Times at the El Royale, in theaters this October. “We didn’t go to a hotel and shout across the suite at each other.”
The subjects—which range from families to sex—were “a group grope between Nick, our editor Jill and me,” says Mullally. And of course, being in conversation format, the topic frequently goes off the rails to very humorous results. Yet, even as they lay bare their thoughts about religion and anal sex, neither feels this book is giving away too many secrets. “It’s funny, because you can barely get people’s significant other’s names out of [most celebrities], much less that torrent of personal information that we spew forth and unhesitatingly,” says Mullally. “But here’s the funny part—our relationship is still totally private. I don’t feel that in any way people know, people will never know, what our real relationship is.”
Main image credit: Peter Hapak/Trunk Archive
