Paul Thomas Anderson is expected to finally be crowned an Oscar winner this weekend and you can expect his longtime partner Maya Rudolph to be by his side!
The 55-year-old filmmaker has received 14 Academy Award nominations throughout his career, including three nods for his current film One Battle After Another. There’s a good chance he’ll win all three of them.
While many people have credited Maya as Paul‘s “wife” over the years, they aren’t actually married! They do call each other husband and wife though.
Keep reading to find out more…
Maya and Paul met in the early 2000s at an SNL after-party, when she was part of the cast and he was known for movies like Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
Maya recently told Town & Country, “He said he saw me in a sketch and said, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’ But I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Maybe he just told me that to be sweet.”
The couple share four children – Pearl, Lucille, Jack, and Minnie.
After welcoming their first child, Maya continued performing on SNL and commuted to New York from their home in Los Angeles on weeks when there was a show. She did this for two years before eventually leaving the show in 2007.
“I thought, This is all going great! I’d always wanted to have kids. I’d always wanted to live in New York. I’d always wanted to be on Saturday Night Live,” she said. “This little bald baby, listening to the musical guests warm up. I look back and I can’t believe I did that. It was crazy. I don’t think I slept for two years.”
Even though they aren’t married, Maya says that she calls Paul her “husband” because “people know what that means. It means he’s the father of my child, and I live with him, and we are a couple, and we are not going anywhere.”
Paul also refers to Maya as his wife and he previously commented on how she inspired his movie Phantom Thread.
“When I get sick, I deal with it in a few different ways. First, I get very cranky and I pretend that I’m not sick because I don’t want to be slowed down. I don’t want to miss anything. Usually, that can work. But if that doesn’t work, and you get really sick and you’re flat on your back, you need help and you become vulnerable,” he told Collider. “I remember that I was very sick, just with the flu, and I looked up and my wife looked at me with tenderness that made me think, ‘I wonder if she wants to keep me this way, maybe for a week or two.’”
