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What To Know
- Kyle Chandler has been with his wife Kathryn for decades.
- The Friday Night Lights star has shared many details about their relationship over the years.
- Find out how long they’ve been together, how they met, and more below.
Before he was starring as a DEA agent in The Rip, Kyle Chandler became a household name as Coach Eric on Friday Night Lights, alongside his TV wife Connie Britton. Eric and Tami solidified themselves as one of TV’s great married couples — and it turns out that Chandler had a strong off-screen partnership of his own while bringing that dynamic to life.
Chandler’s been with his wife, Kathryn, for decades. “My wife is my best friend,” he told Men’s Health, adding, “She knows who I really am and still appreciates me. Here I have a new show, the critics are going crazy, and for a minute you think, ‘How can I reinvent myself?’ But success is attached to being who you are. My wife knows I’m a complete idiot, and she reminds me every day that success is meaningless if I’m pretending to be someone I’m not.”
Now that the actor’s action-thriller is making a splash on Netflix, who is the woman keeping him grounded? Swooon has the full breakdown of Kyle and Kathryn Chandler’s love story.
Who is Kyle Chandler’s wife?
Kathryn was a model before she started screenwriting. She told the Chicago Sun-Times that she had put her career on hold to start a family. Since that 1999 interview, their family moved from Los Angeles to Texas, and Kathryn started the nonprofit Patriots’ Hall. She serves as its vice president and founding board member, helping veterans “of all ages and military service to explore therapeutic workshops, art classes, weekend campouts, education and employment seminars, family gatherings,” and more.
How did Kyle Chandler meet his wife?
In the mid-1990s, the couple had a movie-like meet cute at a dog park in California. “I would take my little Jack Russell terrier there, and sometimes I’d run into Kyle and his dog,” Kathryn recalled to the Chicago Sun-Times. “So we would kind of smile at each other and do the triple take, but we wouldn’t really do anything about it.”
One day, she decided to make a move when they were alone in the park. “So I said to [her dog] Otis — who never does anything that I tell him — ‘Go over and jump on that guy.’ And he did! He went over and just pounced on Kyle, who said, `Whoa, friendly dog you got here.’”
How long have Kyle Chandler and his wife been together?
That first interaction didn’t lead to a date immediately. They discovered that they lived on the same street, and when Kathryn noticed a moving van in front of her future husband’s house six months after the dog park, she decided to approach him again. His neighbors, ultimately, were the ones that were moving, so the actor asked Kathryn out to the movies.
They wed in 1995, so they recently celebrated 30 years of marriage. “We trust each other — absolutely, 100 percent. We run into some pretty tough arguments sometimes, but the idea is that at the end of the day, my wife and I realize that we’ll always be holding each other’s hand,” Kyle said, according to People, in 2008. “This is a lifelong relationship, and after 12 years she hasn’t gotten rid of me yet.”
The actor told Men’s Journal that even in the rough patches, he never considered walking away. When he was filming in Chicago, Kyle and his wife had a fight that had the latter wondering if their relationship would last. Kyle, in turn, told her about his grandparents, who remained by each other’s side until his grandfather died. His grandmother had her hand on her husband’s in his final moments.
Kyle assured Kathryn, “Nothing’s ever going to happen to us. We’re going to make it to the end. One day one of us will be lying on that bed, and one will put their hand on the other’s hand and say, ‘Hey, we made it.’”
Does Kyle Chandler and his wife have kids?
The Chandler family includes their two daughters, Sydney and Sawyer. Sydney Chandler, who was born in 1996, has started working in the entertainment industry. She’s acted in a number of movies and shows, including Olivia Wilde‘s Don’t Worry Darling, FX’s Alien: Earth, and the Hulu limited series Pistol.
Not known about her sister, Sawyer, who was born in 2001. The Austin American-Statesman reported that Sawyer and her dad lobbied against shark finning in 2013, but the 24-year-old seems to keep out of the spotlight.
