A private romance built to last. Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy had instant chemistry when they met on the set of their movie Evening.
“I was very recently single, and I had never been single before, so we were just friends for a while,” the Homeland alum recalled their first meeting during a February 2017 interview with Marie Claire. “[Hugh and I] met in Rhode Island when it was at its most audaciously beautiful, in the fall. And there was one day when we were bicycling by the water and it was sparkly and idyllic, and I just had this dumb epiphany, like, ‘I’m really just happy.’”
While Danes was interested in the England native, she had decided to take a break from relationships after a string of failed ones. After she felt her “palate was cleansed” following a one-night stand during a production hiatus on Evening, she realized it was Dancy she wanted all along.
“[I thought,] ’Oh s—t! I think I’m going to marry this person,’” she recalled during a January 2020 appearance on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast. “[That was how] the end of my life as a single person was realized.”
Dancy, for his part, was particularly pleased upon her realization before they started dating.
“I can only say that I’m really glad my wife chose to have a one-night stand with an inadequate lover,” the Ella Enchanted star joked on SiriusXM’s “The Michelle Collins Show” in May 2020. “It was kind of in the moment [when] she was single, I was single, and we were both clearly thinking about it. She was also thinking, I suppose, as one often does, ‘Well, do I want to jump back into another relationship?’ She had just come out of one.”
After just a few dates, Danes was smitten.
“Well, Hugh’s a big nerd, too,” the Romeo + Juliet actress said during a February 2020 interview with Net-A-Porter’s Porter magazine. “When we first started sorta-kinda-dating for real-ish, I had an ornament-making party for Christmas, and he helped organize it. Then he made an ornament of cowboy paper dolls, and I thought, ‘And he crafts?’ That was it. You have me for the rest of our lives.”
After several years together, Dancy proposed in February 2009. They wed in a romantic ceremony in France that September.
“It’s great. They’re both treating me very well,” the Hannibal alum gushed about marriage and fatherhood during a May 2013 interview with the U.K.’s Evening Standard amid busy careers. “If Hannibal comes around again, our schedules would overlap by a couple of months, which would mean either I could be with her or she with me, or neither of us would be working, and there’d be a period where we’d have to commute. It’s a complicated balance, like any marriage. We have got to be happy as a unit and I also want both of us to be happy independently and fulfilled in what we do, so there has to be some elbow room.”
The married couple shares two sons Cyrus and Rowan, born in 2012 and 2018, and have since enjoyed their quiet lives as a family of four.
Scroll below for Danes and Dancy’s complete relationship timeline: