Stephen Colbert and Wife Evie Had an Adorable Meet-Up — Right After Being Given an Ultimatum

The moment Stephen Colbert saw Evie McGee, he knew she was the one for him.

“A little voice in my head said, ‘Here’s your wife. You’re going to marry her,'” the TODAY late-night show host said on Sept. 19.

Colbert, 60, and McGee Colbert, 61, shared the adorable story of how they met while chatting with TODAY’s Craig Melvin about their new cookbook, “Does This Taste Funny? Recipes Our Family Loves.”

It seems like the couple had a blast creating their first cookbook together, but things weren’t always so smooth between them in the kitchen, they later explained on TODAY with Hoda & Jenna.

“Stephen can be bossy. I know everybody’s gonna be surprised by this, but he can be,” McGee Colbert told Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager with a laugh. “So when we got married, he was kind of like, ‘You do this, you do that.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t want anybody telling me what to do!’”

Colbert then came to his own defense, explaining that he had suggested his wife use a wooden spoon instead of a metal one on their nonstick pans.

“I got into a skillet massacre… and this one involves scraping the bottom of a skillet where we were making a sauce with a metal spoon, and I just handed him a wooden spoon,” he said.

“…in a very condescending way,” McGee Colbert added.

“You put the spoon down and walked out of the kitchen, and we didn’t cook together for 27 years,” Colbert joked.

Colbert and McGee Colbert have been married for over 30 years and share three adult children, Madeleine, Peter and John.

Read on to learn more about Stephen Colbert’s wife, Evie McGee Colbert, and their love story.

They had a meet cute

During a joint visit to TODAY, the host of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” shared how he and his wife met during their joint visit to TODAY.

The comedian explained that a former girlfriend gave him an ultimatum regarding marriage and he wasn’t sure what to do.

“I went home to South Carolina to think about it, because I think more clearly floating in the creek,” he said.

Back home, his mother asked him if he wanted to marry his then-girlfriend, to which Colbert replied, “I don’t know.”

“And she said, ‘I don’t know’ is not enough,” Colbert recalled.

That evening, his mother invited him to the theater.

“I met Evie in the lobby of this theater, I saw her and I thought a little voice in my head was saying, ‘This is your wife. You’re going to marry her,'” he said.

McGee Colbert shared her memories of that moment in the theater lobby when she and her husband stopped by TODAY with Hoda and Jenna on Thursday.

“I saw this very handsome man walk into the room and my first thought was, ‘He loves his mother.’ He had his mother on his arm,” she recalls.

She and Colbert had met before, growing up a street away from each other, but she said she didn’t recognize him at first.

“He was well-dressed and older,” she said. “And I thought, ‘What a classy guy, and he loves his mother.’”

They went on their first date in Charleston the day after Christmas, after meeting in May, McGee Colbert recalled in an Instagram video shared to the “Late Show” Instagram page in honor of the couple’s 30th wedding anniversary.

During the date, McGee Colbert said her now-husband told her a story about a dream he had the night before about a specific item on their restaurant menu.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is unusual,'” McGee Colbert said with a laugh.

“It was so crazy, and I remember thinking, ‘He’s either really, really crazy or really interesting,’” she added.

She and Colbert married in 1993.

The couple married in October 1993.

They shared some memories from their wedding day when McGee Colbert stopped by “The Late Show” to celebrate their milestone anniversary in 2023.

When Colbert asked his wife what she remembered about their wedding day, she laughed and replied, “How nervous you were.”

“I wasn’t sure he would make it,” she added.

“I didn’t realize I was getting married until I got to the church,” Colbert replied with a laugh. “I really did when I saw you in the wedding dress.” Looking back on their decades of marriage, the couple opened up about what they find most romantic in an Instagram video.

“He’s a good listener,” McGee Colbert said of her husband. “The best part about being a partner is being able to listen, and it makes someone very romantic if they can really listen to you.”

And what are the most romantic things about his wife?

“How much do you want? It’s hard, because everything about Evie is romantic,” Colbert said.

She is a producer and actress.

McGee Colbert is vice president of Spartina Productions, a production company founded by Colbert. She is also a founding board member of Montclair Film, the nonprofit organization that operates the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey.

McGee Colbert has extensive experience in nonprofit theater. She previously served as director of development for the Drama League of New York and the Remains Theater in Chicago, according to her Montclair State University biography.

She also trained at the Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York, whose notable alumni include Viola Davis, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Idina Menzel.

While McGee Colbert has focused more on producing than acting in recent years, she played Clair Noblet in the 2005 film “Strangers with Candy,” based on a sitcom of the same name co-created by her husband in the late ’90s. She also made a cameo appearance in “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” according to her IMDb profile.

McGee has made several appearances on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” over the years and is known for stopping by to read funny holiday cards for her husband’s “First Drafts” segment.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com