Elsbeth’s Carrie Preston Says She Thought Husband Michael Emerson Was Gay When They 1st Met

Elsbeth star Carrie Preston and husband Michael Emerson have been going strong for over three decades, but their relationship was almost a non-starter.

The couple met 31 years ago while costarring in a production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Preston, 58, recalled on the Tuesday, October 7, episode of the “Dinner’s On Me With Jesse Tyler Ferguson” podcast. However, despite finding him attractive, the actress admitted she initially thought Emerson, 71, was gay.

“I got cast and, the first day of rehearsal, in walks this guy in a three-piece suit. I was like, ‘Who the hell’s that guy?’” Preston recalled. “He walked into rehearsal with the three-piece suit, and I was like, ‘Oh, he’s gay.’ I was like, ‘He’s gay. Oh, no, OK, I have another crush on the gay guys,’ because they’re the coolest ones, and they’re always well-dressed and so polite.”

“I was like, ‘OK, damn it.’ You know? ‘All right, I’ll just be friends with this guy,’” she continued.

Preston said she inquired about the Lost alum to her brother, actor John G. Preston, also part of the Hamlet cast, who set the record straight.

“I was like, ‘Hey, you know, well what do you think about this Michael Emerson?’” she said, noting that her brother was “trying to hook me up with some other guy.” She added, “I was like, ‘Well, what about Michael Emerson?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, Emerson’s cool.’ I was like, ‘But he’s gay, right?’ And he’s like, ‘No.’ He was like, ‘He’s so not.’”

After discovering that Emerson was straight, Preston said she “started getting shy around him,” however, it seems that he also had eyes for her. The Good Wife actress noted that early on in their courtship, Emerson left flowers for her outside of her door and invited her to a party.

Within a month of dating, the Emmy winner said she knew the Person of Interest actor was the one for her.

“Like, a month later, I was calling my mom, ‘You need to come meet the man. I’m gonna marry. I’m not gonna tell him that. But you need to come meet the man,’” she said.

Preston told Ferguson that she and Emerson just celebrated 27 years of marriage. They have been together for 31 years in total.

Emerson recently had a recurring role on the second season of Elsbeth, his wife’s hit CBS legal drama, playing corrupt a judge, Milton Crawford, who serves as an antagonist to her character, Elsbeth Tascioni.

“It is fun,” Emerson told Deadline of working with his wife in November 2024. “I have to say that it’s a little more after work because part of me is having to set aside the fact that I know Carrie and that I actually got out of bed that very morning with her. So I have to erase that, and that takes some mental power. I have to pretend that she’s someone I don’t know, but in fact, it’s a character named Elsbeth Tascioni.”

Preston told the outlet, “The fun thing about working with Michael is that, we’ve been together for 30 years. We’ve been married 26, so we have this ease with each other. We didn’t even talk about the scenes at home, and we didn’t work on them together. We did the minimum, we just ran the lines for words in the van on the way to work to make sure we knew the lines. And then we just showed up and were able to put each other’s performances in the other’s hands.”