Carrie Preston is without a doubt an outstanding actress! However, the fact that she, too, had a talent crush on her husband Michael Emerson when they were just getting to know each other is sweet. Michael Emerson and Preston have been married since 1998 and are still going strong.

At the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Carrie Preston met her husband

Preston first met the man who would become her husband when he was still in school. He was a master’s degree candidate at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Preston resided in New York at the time, but she was in Montgomery for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

She first witnessed him in multiple roles in A Christmas Carol. According to an interview with Entertainment Weekly (via CheatSheet), the two met on the Hamlet set.

While Emerson portrayed the protagonist’s childhood friend, Guildenstern and Preston played Ophelia, and he presented her with a bouquet of fresh flowers and a basket of peaches from his peach tree.

Michael Emerson was Carrie Preston’s “Crush on Talent”

Preston admitted in another interview with People that she has always had a talent crush on Emerson.

“Within a month, I called my mother and told her, ‘I’ve met the man I’m going to marry,'” she recalled.

Thankfully, the sentiment was returned. Once they discovered love, the distance could not separate them. Four years were spent dating while traveling between New York and Alabama.

In 1998, they were married at a theater in her hometown of Macon, Georgia, followed by a move to New York City, which Emerson referred to as “Home with a big H.”

In their nearly two decades of marriage, they have never had children, but in 2010 they adopted Chumley, a poodle-Maltese mix, whom they treasure as their only “child.”