A Guide to Stephen Colbert’s Family: All About His Wife & 3 Kids
What To Know
- Stephen Colbert and his son are collaborating on a new Lord of the Rings film.
- Colbert has been married to Evelyn McGee Colbert since 1993.
- The couple’s three adult children are all involved in media and entertainment.
Stephen Colbert has got a plan after The Late Show ends later this year: He’s headed to Middle Earth. On March 24, Variety reported that the comedian was pivoting from late-night hosting to screenwriting, working on the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past.
Peter Jackson, who directed the original trilogy of films, will work with Colbert, who came up with the idea of the film. It’ll pull from chapters of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring that Jackson’s 2001 movie adaptation left out. The host brought the idea to his son, screenwriter Peter McGee, who helped him outline the new film.
Now that the new Lord of the Rings movie is a family affair, you might have found yourself wondering about Colbert’s family. We’re breaking down everything we know about the comedian’s wife and three kids below.
Who is Stephen Colbert’s wife?
Evelyn McGee Colbert has been with her husband since the beginning of his career. They met in a theater lobby, both there to see the musical Hydrogen Jukebox, and Colbert remembers thinking to himself, “Her. That’s your wife. You’re going to marry her.”
When they saw each other at the show’s after-party, Colbert knew he couldn’t let her go, according to People. He thought, “‘You will kick yourself for the rest of your life if you do not turn around and say hello to her.'” They later found out that their families, both based in South Carolina, knew each other when they were children. Evelyn married the comedian in 1993.
Like her husband, Evelyn works in the entertainment industry. She has some acting credits, including the comedy series Strangers With Candy and Alpha House. She’s also the vice president of Spartina Productions, which her husband started, and is the president of the Montclair Film Board of Trustees.
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She’s also an author. Evelyn and her husband collaborated on the cookbook Does This Taste Funny?, which came out in 2024 and shares a rare glimpse into their private family’s life.
“It’s an interesting step for us,” Evelyn told People. “We are very private, and we’ve sort of kept our family and our children and everything away from what you might want to call fame. But they’re adults now, and they all willingly participated.”
Who are Stephen Colbert’s kids?
Colbert has three adult kids. Though they mostly remain out of the spotlight, the comedian has talked about his kids and parenthood publicly over the years.
In 2014, he told Buzzfeed, “No one tells you anything about being a parent. Here’s the thing, no matter what they tell you, they aren’t telling you anything, because you just can’t explain it, ya know? You just can’t explain what it’s like to be a parent until you are a parent. It’s like, poetry might get at it, but it’s such an experience, not an idea, that trying to explain it… There’s no explaining it. I didn’t know what to expect. But I think the most surprising thing is that, while it’s hard — it’s hard — but even the hard parts are just beautiful. Because they’re hard, sometimes.”
Stephen Colbert with his daughter, Madeleine Colbert, on December 6, 2015. (Credit: Kris Connor/Getty Images)
Madeleine Carlisle
Colbert’s oldest child, Madeleine, is a journalist. Using the last name “Carlisle,” she’s an associate producer at 60 Minutes, where she also interned in college. According to her “Your First Byline” interview, she got her first professional byline in 2018, when she was a politics fellow at The Atlantic. She attended Yale University and edited its political magazine while she was there. Madeleine also worked as a staff writer for TIME.
Colbert has offered a few anecdotes about his daughter over the years — as has Jennifer Garner. The actress babysat Madeleine when she was just a year old. “I remember your gorgeous little girl,” Garner said on The Late Show in 2017. “She was really smart, she was very verbal, and she was precocious and adorable.”
Madeleine, who was born around 1995, also shared her dad’s sense of humor from a young age. In his 2011 biography, And Nothing But the Truthiness: The Rise (and Further Rise), Colbert wrote, “For a solid year, Madeleine and I made up jokes on the spot before she went to bed. One of her favorites was, ‘What did the cow say?’ ‘What?’ ‘Ruff.’ ‘Why?’ ‘He had a dog in his mouth.'”
She also had a strong sense of self when she was young. When a fan asked him for parenting advice during a 2023 taping of his show, Colbert recalled “the most wonderful way” his then-6-year-old daughter won an argument.
“My daughter … she runs up to her bedroom, and I follow her up there, and Peter, my middle son, follows me,” he said. “I’m holding the baby in my arms, and she turns to me from her bed, she goes like, ‘Why are you yelling at us?’ I said, ‘Because it is my job as a father to discipline you!’ … and I said, ‘So, I have to teach you!’ She pauses for a moment, and she looks up at me from her tear-stained pillow, and she says, ‘This is how you teach children? By making us cry?’ And it was such a clenching reminder — she won not only the argument, but she won life with that statement.”
@colbertlateshow In this Audience Q&A, Stephen shares his best parenting advice. Turns out kids might be a lot smarter than we think! Listen to more from Stephen on our podcast. #Colbert ♬ original sound – colbertlateshow
John Colbert, Peter Colbert, and Stephen Colbert on November 21, 2015. (Credit: Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images)
Peter McGee
Peter, who uses his mom’s last name, has been building up his entertainment resume over the past few years. He’s no stranger to the Lord of the Rings universe, having appeared alongside his dad and his younger brother in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in cameo roles. Peter studied film at Northwestern and turned to behind-the-camera work after that.
According to People, Peter wrote and directed the 2018 short film At the Crossroads Down Yonder, and he co-executive-produced and directed the Where’s Noah? comedy series. The outlet also says he worked in the sound department for the 2020 short Those Who Move Mountains. That year, his mom asked him to help out with filming his dad’s show during the pandemic, per an interview with Cherry Bombe.
“Our son, Peter, who was a film major at Northwestern at the time, he was a senior, he was great,” she said. “He got everything up and running. He could talk the language. He knew what needed to be done. Eventually, he said to us, I’m not going to graduate from college if I keep doing this. So he’s like, “I’m out. I got to finish my classes.'”
Peter has also worked on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, The Righteous Gemstones, Blue Bloods, Outer Banks, per Variety. He’s also the lead singer of rock band Evil Twin, which is based in Brooklyn, New York.
John Colbert
John is the youngest member of the Colbert family, born in 2002. Details about him are harder to come by, though his dad talked about him in 2014. “The 12-year-old still seems to like me,” he told BuzzFeed. “That’s nice! I think all three of them like me, but I’ve got two teenagers and a 12-year-old. He’s within months of being a teenager. Then it’s all over. Then my wife and I might as well live alone.”
John, like his brother, has worked on a few short films, all of which premiered in 2019. In one of them, Cardboard by Your Name, he plays a character who’s best friends with a cardboard cutout of Danny DeVito. Plus, in his family’s cookbook, John has five pages dedicated to his sourdough expertise. (He’s got range!)
