12. Despite all that agita, Williams-Paisley credits the film with changing her entire life—including leading her to real-life husband Brad Paisley. In 1991, the future country star was still an aspiring musician and for him and the girl he was dating “it was, like, their movie,” Williams-Paisley shared with E! News. And yet the 18-year-old singer had a hard time focusing on anything other than the insanely attractive actress he saw onscreen.
Four years later, newly single and a little sad, he returned to the theater for Father of the Bride Part II and, once again, found himself entranced by the star. “I thought, she seems like a great girl—smart and funny and all those things that are so hard to find,” he told Good Housekeeping.
He’d go on to write a song about his experience seeing the movie for his 2001 album Part II. And at that point, he told the mag, “It felt natural to ask her to be in it. Even though I didn’t know if she was married, divorced or just out of rehab.”
The actress was none of those things, but she was intrigued. “He woke up one morning and decided he wanted to call me, so I said alright because I’m a sucker for someone who’s interested,” she recalled to Meredith Vieira, “and we started dating and pretty soon after that, we were engaged.”
Having scored the ultimate meet-cute, it’s a tale they’ve shared a time or two. “It’s funny when we tell the story of how we met, he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, this is what happened: I was dating this girl and blah, blah, blah,’ and that’s all his version of how he saw me in this movie,” Williams-Paisley told E! News. “And my version is, ‘Oh yeah, well he stalked me and it was just easier to go ahead and marry him.'”
