Stephen Colbert and wife Evie had an adorable meet-cute — right after he got an ultimatum

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

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

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

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

“Stephen can be bossy. I know everyone will be really surprised about that, but he can be,” McGee Colbert told Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager with a laugh. “So when we first got married, he was a little bit of like, ‘You do this, you do that.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t want someone telling me what to do!’”

Colbert then jumped to his own defense, explaining that he had suggested his wife use a wooden spoon instead of a metal spoon on their non-stick pans.

“I jumped into a pan massacre… and this one is scraping the bottom of a pan that we were making a sauce in with a metal spoon, and I just handed her a wooden spoon,” he said.

“…In a very patronizing way,” McGee Colbert chimed in.

“You put the spoon down and walked out of the kitchen, and we did not cook together for another 27 years,” Colbert joked.

Colbert and McGee Colbert have been married for more than 30 years, and they 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 Late Show with Stephen Colbert” host told the story of how he and his wife met during their joint visit to TODAY.

The comedian explained that a previous girlfriend had given him a marriage ultimatum, 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.

When he got home, his mother asked if he wanted to marry his then-girlfriend, to which Colbert responded, “I don’t know.”

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

That night, his mom invited him to the theater.

“I put Evie in the lobby of that theater, and I saw her, and I thought, a little voice in my head said, ‘There’s 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 & Jenna Thursday.

“I looked at this very handsome man coming into the theater and my first thought was, ‘He loves his mother.’ He had his mother on his arm,” she recalled.

She and Colbert had actually met before because they grew up one street away from each other, but she said she didn’t recognize him at first.

“He was all dressed up and older,” she said. “And I just thought, ‘What a fancy guy, and he loves his mother.’”

They went on their first date in Charleston the day after Christmas, after having met that May, McGee Colbert recalled in an Instagram video shared on 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 just 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 tied the knot in 1993

The couple married in October 1993.

They shared a few memories from their wedding day when McGee Colbert stopped by “The Late Show” on their milestone anniversary in 2023.

When Colbert asked his wife what she remembered about their wedding day, she answered with a laugh, “How nervous you were.”

“I wasn’t sure he was going to make it,” she added.

“It didn’t occur to me that I was getting married until a couple hours before I got to the church,” Colbert replied with a chuckle. “It really sank in when I saw you in the wedding dress.” Looking back on their decades of marriage, the couple opened up about what they found most romantic in an Instagram video.

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

As for the most romantic things about his wife?

“How many do you want? That is hard, because everything about Evie is romantic,” Colbert said.

She is a producer and actor

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 non-profit organization that runs the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey.

McGee Colbert has extensive experience working in non-profit theater. She was previously the director of development for the Drama League of New York and the Remains Theater of Chicago, according to her Montclair State University bio.

She also trained at the Circle in the Square Theater School in New York City, 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 had a cameo 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 greeting cards for her husband’s “First Drafts” segment.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com