“I could tell I was having feelings, but then I was like, ‘Well, I can’t say anything because I’m about to have a baby,'” Lindhome said while recalling their whirlwind romance.
Riki Lindhome is opening up about her romance with Fred Armisen more than two years the pair secretly tied the knot.
In a new interview with People, the Wednesday actress detailed working the with the Saturday Night Live alum on the Netflix comedy in Romania, and how what had been a 15-year friendship blossomed into much more.
“I could tell I was having feelings, but then I was like, ‘Well, I can’t say anything because I’m about to have a baby,” Lindhome, who was expecting a baby via surrogacy and a donated sperm and egg, told the outlet.
“He didn’t get to meet Keaton until three weeks after he was born because he was still working. And I said, ‘All I want is the truth. If you feel in your gut that’s not for you, it doesn’t make you a jerk. I’m not mad at you,” she told him. “I said, ‘I still think you’re the best. I just want you to really feel what you feel. And then be honest about it because it’s a big life-altering thing.’ And he said, ‘Okay, okay.'”
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Lindhome didn’t want to pressure Armisen either. Just weeks into their relationship, she instead urged him to go with his heart — and luckily, his heart said yes. “I told him, ‘So you just tell me what your heart says, and he said ‘Yes.’ It was just insta-family, basically,” she said with a laugh.
Their relationship grew during their two months together on set, with Lindhome recalling wanting to tell Armisen how she felt.
“I knew that I was starting to have feelings for him, and I wanted to go on a date. That’s what I knew. So I was like, ‘Okay, let’s explore,’ Lindhome recalled. “Then it unfolded naturally over time. I wasn’t like, ‘You’re the dad.’ I was like, ‘I want to have dinner with you.’ My thought was, ‘I want to kiss you. I want to see you.’ Then it just kept going,”
Two weeks before Keaton was born on March 1, 2022, she told Armisen that she loved him, calling the timing “weird” and “crazy.”
“We were friends for so long that it just happened fast. We had one dinner and then it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s see where this goes,'” she remembered. “It was surprising. I would say it was more of a shock to him. He did not see it coming at all.”
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After Keaton was born, she moved into Armisen’s home and they started their life as a family. The pair quietly tied the knot three months later and the rest is really history.
“I was ready to date him, I didn’t know what it would turn into,” Lindhome said. “I thought maybe I would be a single mom with a boyfriend. I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t even know if he was interested at first — I didn’t know anything. But it was a natural evolution.”
She continued, “Then we got married in a courthouse. It’s not a secret, but we didn’t really tell people. We didn’t announce it or anything. And we thought people would hear about it eventually. And that’s what happened, one friend at a time.”
Lindhome says the couple kept it simple — her dress was from the mall and Armisen wore a suit. They picked out their own engagement rings and got married on a random Wednesday afternoon — an ode to the time they fell in love on set.
“The wedding was three minutes long and then we got some ice cream,” she gushed.
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Touching on their non-traditional relationship, Lindhome said while she thinks Armisen, who had previously been coupled up with Russian Doll star, Natasha Lyonne, for eight years, may have been hesitant at first, she wanted him to arrive at the decision on his own.
“I’m sure he had reservations, I’m sure. I had been planning on being a single mom. I wasn’t planning on adding another entity into the mix,” the Adventure Time actress explained.
She continued, “It was something we had to find together and see if it could work. Every relationship has a different pace. Every single one. Mine was faster because I was in a different circumstance.”
“But we just went at the pace that was natural. It didn’t feel rushed. We just found our rhythm together,” she added, before noting that it could have been a disastrous situation. “But it wasn’t. It felt like it just was good.”
