Preston met her husband of 27 years when the pair were cast in a production of “Hamlet” at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.
It was love at first sight when Carrie Preston met her husband of 27 years, Michael Emerson. But she was convinced just as quickly it would never work out between them.
The Elsbeth star reflected on the origins of her enduring bond with Emerson on Tuesday’s episode of the Dinner’s On Me podcast with host Jesse Tyler Ferguson. The pair met after being cast in a production of Hamlet at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival when Preston was in her mid-to-late 20s and Emerson was nearing 40, Preston explained.
“I got cast, and first day of rehearsal in walks this guy in a three-piece suit, and I was like, ‘Wow,’ Preston reflected. “Everybody else is in actor-wear, and he’s in a three-piece suit playing Guildenstern, and I was like, ‘Who the hell is that guy?'”
Preston, now 58, said that she “fell in love with him already on stage, and then he walked into rehearsal with a three-piece suit and I was like, ‘Oh, he’s gay. He’s gay! Oh no. Okay, another crush on the gay guys.'”
The two-time Emmy-nominated actress explained that she arrived at her sudden judgement on Emerson’s orientation because, to her, queer people are often “the coolest ones, and they’re always well dressed, and they’re so polite.”
She acknowledged that she was “totally stereotyping here,” but continued in her assertion that queer people are “the most talented, and still to this day, all of my best friends. So I was like, ‘Okay, damn it. Alright, I’ll just be friends with this guy.'”
Gratefully, Preston’s older brother John, a fellow actor also appeared in the company of Hamlet alongside his sister and Emerson, was able to debunk Carrie’s assumptions. “I asked my brother, I was like, ‘Hey, you know, well what do you think about this Michael Emerson?’ Because my brother was trying to hook me up with some other guy… He was like, ‘Oh, Emerson’s cool.’ I was like, ‘But he’s gay, right?’ And he was like, ‘No! [He’s] so not.'”
Once Preston cleared up her misconceptions about the Lost and Evil star, it was off to the races. In 2012, the couple looked back on their auspicious start with Entertainment Weekly. Preston recalled that while still costarring in Hamlet, she began to find “little vases of fresh flowers and baskets of peaches waiting outside my door,” left by Emerson. “He was very romantic.”
The pair married in 1998, and have since shared the screen on multiple occasions.
In 2007, Preston appeared in a flashback on a season 3 episode of Emerson’s hit show Lost as Emily Linus – the mother to Emerson’s character Ben Linus. Last year, Emerson joined Preston’s hit CBS comedy procedural Elsbeth as the villainous Judge Milton Crawford, a witty foil to Preston’s lovably wacky heroine.
You can listen to Preston’s full interview on Dinner’s On Me above.
