Chrissy Teigen and John Legend are hands down a beloved celebrity couples. But long before the stars became the parents of four kids together, Teigen’s first encounter with Legend was actually pretty relatable: they worked together, had a casual hookup, and went their separate ways. Yes, their epic “how we met” story is surprisingly common.
In 2007, the then-21-year-old catalog model starred as Legend’s love interest in the music video for his song “Stereo” — and he instantly made an impression, per Teigen’s 2014 interview with Cosmopolitan: “I walked into John’s dressing room to meet him, and he was ironing in his underwear,” Teigen told the publication. “I said, ‘You do your own ironing!?’ He said, ‘Of course I do.’ I gave him a hug.” Things got steamy both on and off the set. After the shoot, they went back to his hotel room and ate In-N-Out burgers — “I’m not going to lie. We hooked up,” Teigen revealed — and soon after, Legend went on tour in Europe.
“I wasn’t like, ‘This is the woman I’m going to marry’ from day one,” Legend told Entertainment Tonight in 2014. “I’m the kind of person who needs to grow into that feeling. It was probably a couple of years in when I could already see us being together forever.” The two stayed in touch and chatted over the phone, though Teigen admitted, “I was pretending that I didn’t really care, but I wasn’t with anybody else.”
“I let him be himself for a while,” she explained further. “The worst thing you can do is try to lock someone like that down early on, then have them think, ‘There’s so much more out there.’ I played it cool for a long time.” Apparently, it was during their phone conversations that Legend realized he had a good thing. “I just started to fall in love with how engaging and witty and funny she is,” he told ET in 2016. “That’s when I really started to know that this was the kind of person I wanted to be around a lot. Once we started spending more time together between tour stops and all this other stuff, we realized we had such a connection.”
Teigen and Legend entered into a relationship, and after four years of dating, he popped the question. “Never once did I ask, ‘What are we?’ Marriage was never my goal, because I’ve never been very traditional. I was just happy to be with him,” Teigen told Cosmopolitan.
Teigen and Legend tied the knot during an intimate ceremony at Lake Como in Italy in September 2013.
They welcomed their first child, daughter Luna Stephens, in April 2016, their son, Miles Stephens, in May 2018, their second daughter, Esti Stephens, in January, and their second son, Wren Stephens, in June. See? Sometimes a passing fling can turn into true love.