Melanie Lynskey’s career has been on fire the last few years, with Emmy nominated turns in Yellowjackets (about to start filming season 3) and The Last of Us. She’s worked consistently for 30 years, and she’s always been good, but it’s nice to see her getting meatier roles and recognition these days. It’s as if women (and their stories) get even more complicated and compelling as we get older, huh. Melanie was just on The Tonight Show to promote another series, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and she recounted to Jimmy Fallon a hilarious story of how her husband Jason Ritter proposed. He was so low key and confusing, she didn’t even realize it was a proposal until he told his family days later that they were engaged. You have to be pretty damn low key to out-low key a New Zealander!
The way Jason Ritter proposed to Melanie Lynskey was so low-key that she didn’t even know he was proposing.
While appearing on The Tonight Show on Monday, Lynskey shared with host Jimmy Fallon that Ritter had to redo their engagement because his first one was “so confusing.”
“The day before, I had been looking at rings, and I tried one on,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh, it kind of looks like an engagement ring, almost. I don’t think I’m going to get it.’”
Ritter then got her the ring and when he gave it to her, Lynskey thanked him for it, thinking it was just a considerate gift. “It didn’t sort of cross my mind [that it was a proposal],” she told Fallon.
“And then there was this strange speech,” Lynskey continued. “We were just sort of sitting there. He had paused whatever [was on TV], The Bachelor. And I was just sort of like, ‘Oh, OK.’”
She then explained that the proposal was so confusing she actually asked Ritter if they were breaking up. “He was like, ‘No, no, no.’ So I said, ‘OK,’ and then I was like, ‘Well, thank you. Lovely. Good chat?’”
While Lynskey didn’t know what was going on, Ritter was certain she had accepted his proposal. “Then, three days later, we went to meet his family for Christmas, and he said, ‘We’re engaged.’”
Since the engagement mishap, Lynskey said Ritter has been making up for it by proposing “over and over.” A recent re-proposal was on her birthday in Slovakia — with a new ring, as well. Their child even got to be part of it. “He was going to take me out for dinner and do it at dinner, but our daughter was like, ‘Give her the ring, Dad!’” said the actress.
Ritter and Lynskey met while filming The Big Ask in 2013 and started dating that year. The pair announced their engagement in 2017 and married in 2020, nearly two years after the birth of their daughter.
Oh man, I’m dying to know what he said exactly in that proposal attempt. It sounds awkward and confusing and prolonged and that’s totally my jam as an audience member. I would’ve thought Melanie’s asking if they were breaking up would be Jason’s cue to state, in no uncertain terms, how he was aiming for the polar opposite of that. But I guess nerves can always get the better of us. Melanie and Jason are stupidly adorable together. In the past he’s shared how he thought Melanie was incredible from the get go, so much so that it spurred him on to continue working on himself, to be the kind of partner he thought she deserved. And Melanie, for her part, has been singing Jason’s praises for sacrificing his career by staying at home with their daughter so she can go do all these amazing roles. You know, what women have been doing for men for centuries.
Photos credit: Jeffrey Mayer/Avalon