Jenny McCarthy and Donnie Wahlberg’s romance was in the cards.
The Masked Singer judge reflected on her courtship with the Blue Bloods actor during an interview with iHeartRadio’s I Choose Me With Jennie Garth. “We actually met on Watch What Happens Live, Andy Cohen’s show,” McCarthy recalled. “He was the second guest in the second chair and I’d never met him before. And I thought he was married, so I didn’t really flirt with him. I was just like, ‘Oh, you’re a really nice guy.’ Like, I had no idea Andy Cohen was like, ‘You got to ask her out.'”
McCarthy next connected with Wahlberg while hosting her own talk show, The Jenny McCarthy Show, in 2013. “I wound up doing my show and like six months later, he came on as a guest,” she recalled. “So I’m doing my homework and like, ‘Okay, who is he dating?’ He’s not dating anybody. [I] still wasn’t thinking anything.”
The future couple hit it off while filming the interview. “He sat down and I started interviewing him and I was like, ‘Oh, he’s very smart. Oh, he’s very funny. Wow, he’s really cute,'” she remembered. “And then the interview was supposed to be nine minutes. It was 90.”
McCarthy said her connection with Wahlberg was obvious to everyone in the room. “There was so much sparks and chemistry that everyone in the audience was like, ‘Oh my God!'” she said. “And then backstage — I haven’t given my number to a guy ever. And I had my assistant run over there and be like, ‘Here’s Jenny’s number.’ So I’m like, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’ So he wound up waiting for me in his dressing room to say goodbye.”
The Singled Out alum said she panicked after the interview was over. “I was so flushed like a little high school girl,” she recalled. “My face was red and I was like, ‘I can’t walk past him. I can’t walk past him. I’m too scared. I’m too nervous.’ And so I wound up waiting an hour. He was still in the room and I was still scared. So I ran past his room, got in the elevator and I’m like, ‘I just hope he calls me.’ Two weeks gone by and he didn’t call me.”
Wahlberg needed an extra push to reach out to McCarthy. “He thought I just gave my phone number to everybody,” she said. “So he saw a commercial of me asking a psychic on my talk show if I’m going to marry Donnie Wahlberg. And the psychic was like, ‘Yeah.’ And this is before we even went on a date, okay?”
The psychic incident pushed Wahlberg over the edge. “He wound up calling me,” McCarthy remembered. “We went on our first date and then it was game over.”
McCarthy said that her relationship with Wahlberg remains strong. “Donnie was one of those guys that would just support me and be there with me and want to, and celebrate the successes, you know?” she explained. “And he still does it today.”
Listen to the full conversation between McCarthy and Jennie Garth above.
