For Tim Daly, it wasn’t a slow burn — it was immediate.
The actor, 69, says he fell in love with Téa Leoni just “four minutes” after meeting her on the set of CBS’s Madam Secretary in 2014, marking the start of a real-life romance that would quietly unfold behind the scenes before culminating in marriage nearly a decade later.
“It was love at first sight,” Daly revealed in a new interview with LifeMinute. “God — about four minutes after I met her at the Madam Secretary office. I was gone.”
Daly and Leoni, now 59, went on to portray husband and wife Henry and Elizabeth McCord for six seasons on the political drama, which aired from 2014 to 2019. Their on-screen chemistry, viewers later learned, mirrored something very real.
“Every time people said we had great chemistry, I was like, ‘Yeah, no s—!’” Daly said with a laugh. “We were supposedly trying to keep it quiet early on, but it was impossible. The drivers were picking us up at each other’s houses. We were looking at each other with full-on goo-goo eyes.”
The pair made their first public appearance together at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2015, confirming what fans had already suspected.
Their road to marriage, however, came with a twist. Daly admitted he proposed years earlier — and was politely shelved.
“I asked Téa to marry me about nine years ago. She said, ‘Yes, let’s just wait a minute,’” he recalled. “Nine years later, she asked me. I said, ‘I already asked!’ So we finally got it done. And honestly? I love being married to Téa.”
Though Madam Secretary brought them together, fate had placed Daly and Leoni in each other’s orbit long before. The two attended the same high school — a decade apart — and briefly crossed paths twice before their romance ignited.
“I met her once when I was doing Wings. She was this smoking-hot 23-year-old at Paramount,” Daly said. “Didn’t pay attention — my life was chaos back then. Another time, I shook her hand because her then-husband David Duchovny knew my cousin. And that was it.”
Then came 2014 — and everything changed.
“She just kind of caught me in her tractor beam,” Daly said. “It was terrifying. I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ But it was quick.”
Calling their marriage “true intimacy,” Daly said their connection is built on honesty, vulnerability, and deep trust.
“We talk about everything — even the painful stuff,” said the actor, who now stars in Netflix’s Leanne. “Being able to share that with your partner is a relief. It builds real trust.”
And the love story may have been written long before they even met.
“If Téa were here, she’d tell you that when she was a student in Vermont, she saw me in Diner,” Daly said. “She told her roommate she was going to marry me someday. Having never met me.”
He paused, smiling.
“She gets what she wants.”
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