Marvel movies aren’t exactly known for sweeping romantic moments, but there are a handful of iconic couples who manage to keep love alive while saving the world: Pepper Potts and Tony Stark, for example, or Vision and Wanda Maximoff.
The film and TV empire also boasts a few off-screen love matches too, though many of them happened before the Marvel Cinematic Universe was firmly established. Before Iron Man kicked off Phase 1 in 2008, there was 2003’s Daredevil, starring Ben Affleck as blind superhero Matt Murdock.
The movie wasn’t a critical hit, but it was the place where the Argo director fell in love with Jennifer Garner, who played Elektra. The former couple first met while filming 2000’s Pearl Harbor, but the Oscar winner later said that they didn’t really hit it off until 2002 when they were filming Daredevil.
“That’s where I found my wife,” he told Playboy of the movie in 2013. The duo tied the knot in June 2005 and were married for 10 years before calling it quits. The twosome share three children: daughters Violet and Seraphina and son Samuel.
Another real-life Marvel couple met before either party was ever involved in one of the beloved comic-book movies. Three years before she took on the role of Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow, Scarlett Johansson started dating Ryan Reynolds, who would later play Marvel antihero Deadpool. The duo were wed from 2008 to 2011.
Reynolds, for his part, went on to marry Blake Lively, who he actually did meet on the set of a comic-book movie: Green Lantern (which is DC, not Marvel).
“I met Blake on the darkest crease in the anus of the universe called Green Lantern,” the Free Guy star joked during a July 2021 episode of the “SmartLess” podcast. “We were friends and buddies, and about a year and a half later, we went on a double date, but we were dating separate people.”
After taking a train ride to Boston together, their fate was sealed. Once Reynolds realized that his friendship with Lively could evolve into something more, he said it was like “one of those silly moments out of a fairy tale.”
After one year of dating, the couple tied the knot in September 2012. The pair share three daughters: Inez, James, and Betty. “They are the most capable people I know,” the Canada native told Access of his wife and kids in November 2020. “So I think if anything got crazy or scary in my life, they are the first people I would lean on because they have wisdom and strength and they’re calm under fire.”
Keep scrolling for a look back at Marvel stars who once dated: