NEED TO KNOW
- Kate Mara was recently interviewed by Ted Danson on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast
- The actress recalled her early impressions of Jamie Bell, her husband since 2017 and costar in the 2015 movie Fantastic Four
- Mara said she thought Bell was “the biggest catch,” recalling that she tried setting him up with others before falling for him
Kate Mara is recalling her early impressions of now-husband Jamie Bell.
“I just thought he was the best and he was single, and I was trying to set him up with all these people,” the actress, 42, recently told host Ted Danson on Team Coco’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast. Mara and Bell, 39, have been married since 2017 and share two children.
“I thought, ‘I gotta set him up with someone. He’s the biggest catch. How is he not with someone amazing?’ ” she recalled.
With a smile, Mara added, “I just didn’t know that I was the person I was looking for. It took me a year to figure that out.”
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Mara and Bell bonded while filming their 2015 movie Fantastic Four, although they had first met years before during a screen test. “We were friends, but we didn’t really know each other,” she told Danson, 77. “And then we made the Fantastic Four movie together, which was a really interesting experience.”
Prompted by Danson, she added frankly that the superhero flick was “rough” and “not a great experience. It was a mess. Just a messy, messy experience.”
It wasn’t until the press tour of Fantastic Four that Mara and her future husband “fell in love,” she added. “It was sort of like, you know, trauma bonding.”
When Danson asked who fell in love first, Mara didn’t hesitate: “Jamie.” Then, she recalled, “We were like, ‘Oh, I guess we’re getting married.’ Like instantly. ‘Cause we knew each other forever. We just thought, ‘Oh, right. This is going to be forever.’ And here we are, a bunch of kids later. Yeah, it’s the best.”
The House of Cards star and Billy Elliot actor have kept their relationship and family life out of the spotlight. In an interview with Shape in 2018, Mara revealed that she’s “very protective of our marriage” and intentional about staying close with Bell. “All the traveling we both have to do for work can make it hard, but we have a rule that we will never go longer than two weeks without seeing each other.”
Mara and Danson appeared together in the 2009 Jeff Bridges and Justin Timberlake movie The Open Road. The actress will star opposite her sister Rooney in the upcoming Werner Herzog-directed Bucking Fastard. She also appears in the Vince Vaughn-starring Easy’s Waltz, premiering this month at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.
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