On January 12, marie claire’s December cover star Rose Byrne took home the Golden Globe for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical, for her leading role in the comedy-drama If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
During her acceptance speech, Byrne delivered one of the night’s most memorable moments, thanking her “husband” Bobby Cannavale and revealing the very on-brand reason for his absence.
“I want to thank my husband, Bobby, who couldn’t be here because we’re getting a bearded dragon and he went to a reptile expo in New Jersey. So, thank you. Thank you, baby,” she said, to laughter from the room.
The pair have been together for over a decade, share two children, and remain one of Hollywood’s most low-key, enduring couples. Here’s everything to know about their long-term romance.
While Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale have been together since 2012, he is not, in fact, her husband, at least not legally. That technicality, however, has never stopped them from referring to each other as “husband” and “wife”, a linguistic shortcut they both openly prefer.
“I hate all the other words. It’s just easier to say ‘husband and wife.’ ‘Boyfriend and girlfriend’ feels so young. ‘Partner’ feels so sterile,” Cannavale told Vulture in 2020, joking that perhaps they should use “lover” instead. Byrne quickly played along: “Sure. My lover, Bobby.”
Byrne has since explained that marriage has always been part of the plan, but life, and children, have a habit of intervening. In the same interview, she confirmed they fully intended to tie the knot, adding, “We were planning to… and then another baby, and then…” before trailing off.
By November 2025, Byrne was more definitive. “I say ‘married.’ We just haven’t gone to the courthouse yet, but we’re married,” she told The Washington Post, neatly summing up a partnership that, paperwork aside, is very much the real thing.
In a 2017 interview with InStyle, Byrne was openly effusive about Cannavale. “He is one of a kind, man!” she said. “He’s endlessly interesting and entertaining. When something is special, it’s hard to articulate it, but I feel really lucky.”
Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale met during Byrne’s time on Damages, the legal thriller that quietly reshaped her career and introduced her to an entirely new audience.
At the time, Byrne was starring opposite Glenn Close, who would later describe her co-star as having “something so much more than the kind of acting one was seeing on TV at the time,” praising her courage, risk-taking and, most notably, her rare ability to make people laugh.
It was during those Damages years that Byrne and Cannavale were introduced by a mutual friend. The connection was immediate. “The chemistry between them, it’s just so remarkable,” Close has said. “They’re both kind of universally loved.”
In 2013, the couple made their red carpet debut at the CFDA Fashion Awards. More than a decade on, the pairing still feels improbably perfect: two critically respected actors, matched in talent, humour and a shared low-key magnetism.
Yes, they share two sons: Rocco, born in 2016, and Rafa, born in 2017.
Byrne has spoken candidly about the disorienting, all-consuming reality of raising two young boys, telling People, “Every day, every hour, I’m like, ‘What is happening?’ I am learning on the job. I have no business telling anyone what to do.” Motherhood, she added, has been quietly transformative. “Being a mother changes everything. I feel like it informs everything I do, particularly for a job like this.”
Cannavale is also father to Jake Cannavale from his first marriage to Jenny Lumet. The pair divorced in 2003.
Since becoming a couple, Byrne and Cannavale have developed an on-screen partnership almost as prolific as their real-life one, sharing the screen no fewer than seven times.
Their dynamic is elastic, shifting easily from comic to caustic, tender to unhinged. In the 2014 remake of Annie, they were mismatched co-workers – Byrne a bright-eyed assistant, Cannavale a distinctly sleazy political flunky.
A year later in Spy, they darkened the register entirely: she a sadistic Russian arms dealer’s daughter, he a slippery terrorist middleman.
Adult Beginners (2014), Martha the Monster (2017), Seriously Red (2022), The Last Movie Stars (2022) and Ezra (2023) followed, each adding another texture to their shared screen language. It is a body of work that feels unusually rich for a real-life couple, intimate without being indulgent, playful without tipping into novelty.
In fact, it is difficult to think of a contemporary pairing whose combined filmography is quite so abundant, or quite so convincing.
