A Deep Dive Into Paul Thomas Anderson & Maya Rudolph’s Decades-Long Romance
What To Know
- Paul Thomas Anderson and Maya Rudolph have been together for decades.
- They’re set to appear at the 2026 Oscars, with Anderson nominated for 13 awards for One Battle After Another.
- They share four kids, one of whom appears in One Battle After Another.
Paul Thomas Anderson has been up for nearly a dozen Academy Awards since his career began, but he has yet to win a trophy. At the 2026 Oscars, however, the director is predicted to turn the trend around with One Battle After Another, which earned 13 nominations on its own. Regardless of the outcome, Anderson’s longtime love will be there to support him, like she has at many award ceremonies over the years.
If you’ve been keeping up with the awards circuit this year — or any other past years — you might’ve noticed that Anderson has a famous partner by his side. He’s been with actress Maya Rudolph for decades, during which they’ve collaborated a number of times. Though she doesn’t appear his latest film, Rudolph is connected to it. (For one, Dazed Magazine asked he was inspired by the young women of color of today when writing it. “I must be, because I live in a house full of them,” he quipped.)
What’s more, Rudolph is set to present at this year’s ceremony, so that could mean she hands a trophy to Anderson. To mark the occasion, Swooon has done a deep dive into the couple’s relationship history, family, and more.
Are Paul Thomas Anderson and Maya Rudolph married?
The A-list couple hasn’t officially tied the knot, though they have referred to each other as husband and wife since they became parents. “People know what [husband] means,” Rudolph told The New York Times in 2018. “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.”
How long have Paul Thomas Anderson and Maya Rudolph been together?
They’ve reportedly been an item since 2001. When the Los Angeles Times noted that they’ve been called celebrity royalty and the “greatest celebrity couple” since they got together, Anderson said, “That makes me quite nervous.”
When they interviewer guessed that their connection goes back to their sense of humor, Anderson replied, “All the movies I love have big laughs in them… I’ve always gravitated toward comedic actors to work with … hell, to live with … to be friends with. And there’s a reason. Who wants to be around serious people? Is there anything more boring than a serious person?”
How did Paul Thomas Anderson and Maya Rudolph meet?
More than one love story has come out of Saturday Night Live, including Anderson and Rudolph’s. “He said he saw me in a sketch and said, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry,’” Rudolph told Town & Country. “But I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Maybe he just told me that to be sweet.”
They officially met at one of the show’s after parties in 2001. “I had met Molly Shannon,” Anderson said on the Smartless podcast in 2022. “And she said, ‘You know, you could come, and you can see how we do this.’ And at the time I was writing Punch-Drunk Love and I was obsessed with the time that [Adam Sandler] had been there, so I accepted the offer to…watch behind the scenes.”
Anderson spent a week there, and eventually, someone gave him a note that mentioned Rudolph would be joining the cast the next week. “I can remember seeing her name on that piece of paper,” he continued. “I don’t know if you’ve had any feeling like this, but you see something for the first time, and you realize that my life has just changed. I don’t know how, I don’t know why.”
“Looking back, obviously, that kind of impulse, that shining kind of feeling that can happen to any of us if we’re open to it, happened. So, I roamed around, and then I saw her on television, and I saw what she was doing. And I stayed in touch with a few people from the show, and I was like, ‘My God, this woman’s amazing.'”
Shortly after meeting on set, he went to London to shoot Punch-Drunk Love, but returned to New York when “something didn’t feel right” and asked Rudolph out.
Do Paul Thomas Anderson and Maya Rudolph have kids?
The couple has four kids. Their eldest, 20-year-old Pearl, came along four years after they got together. They also share Lucille, 16, Jack, 14, and Minnie, 12. If you keep up with Anderson’s filmography, you might remember that all four of them appeared in 2021’s Licorice Pizza. Pearl went on to snag a role in One Battle, too, playing Sister Coco.
Anderson and Rudolph have settled in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, where Anderson grew up. “It’s pretty Von Trapp,” Anderson told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t know that movie that well. But there’s a scene in You Can’t Take It with You where a woman enters and there’s 50 different family members all banging away on different things in different parts of the house. It’s a little like that. This one’s banging on the piano. This one’s banging on the drum. This one’s singing. It’s very chaotic.”
Rudolph left SNL two years after Pearl was born because of the commute between Los Angeles and New York. “It was too hard, and nobody else understands or cares, when they don’t have kids,” the comedian told The New York Times. “They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cool…What are you guys doing tonight?’ They’re like, ‘We’re going to see Justin Timberlake because Andy’s doing ‘D**k in a Box’ with him! What are you doing?’ And I was like, ‘My daughter’s sick. I’m going home.'”
98th Academy Awards, March 16, 7/6c, ABC and Hulu
