Stephen Colbert admittedly wasn’t ready for prime time, let alone late night, when he first crossed paths with Evelyn “Evie” McGee.
“We first met in college,” the Northwestern alum recalled on SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live in 2024. “A friend from Charleston introduced us at a party and I was chemically impaired and Evie was a distant frost queen on a mountain top.”
So, he didn’t think much of it. As he put it, “The first time, I was like, ‘This is going nowhere.’ Literally, I think it was a 30-second conversation.”
Evie, who graduated from University of Virginia in 1985, wasn’t blown away, either, remembering the 11-time Emmy winner as “an immature, skinny boy.”
In fact, lightning didn’t strike for the Charleston, S.C., natives until 1990, when they saw each other in the lobby of a theater in their hometown and, as Stephen recalled on Today in 2024, “A little voice in my head said, ‘There’s your wife. You’re going to marry her.'”
Meanwhile, Evie was “intrigued.”