Ben Stiller makes wife Christine Taylor feel a lot like Carrie Bradshaw — just not in the way you might expect.

On the latest episode of the Are You a Charlotte? podcast, Taylor joined host Kristin Davis to discuss the sixth episode of Sex and the City, which memorably sees Sarah Jessica Parker‘s Carrie go on her first date with Mr. Big (Chris Noth). 

Though it gets off to a good start, their romance hits a road bump when Carrie begins to suspect that her new beau is using under-the-radar destinations to hide their relationship… Something that Taylor is all too familiar with.

“Ben and I went on our first date and Ben was Ben Stiller,” explained the Sweethearts actress, who met Stiller in 1999, after he directed her in an unaired TV pilot. “There’s Something About Mary had come out, and it was huge.”

Though they were both “getting out of relationships” at the time, Taylor said they had already clicked and  “laughed a lot” while working together. So when he asked her out to dinner, she couldn’t say no.

She added, “But he was still Ben Stiller, so he attracted attention wherever he went.”

Evidently, Stiller already had a plan in place for avoiding paparazzi. When he arrived at her Laurel Canyon home to pick her up, he “casually” suggested they pick a restaurant in a Los Angeles neighborhood that wasn’t yet trendy so they could go unnoticed.

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“I laugh now because I got it without him having to say it, and it was his way of not wanting to offend me,” she explained. “He was just like, ‘Hey, I love the Valley. I don’t go to a lot of restaurants in the Valley. Like, are there any good restaurants that you like over here?'”

It wasn’t too hard for Taylor to read between the lines and piece together his unspoken request: “What I was reading was like, ‘This is a first date. The last thing we want is for paparazzi to catch a picture and there to be some sort of story.’ It really made me laugh because he didn’t think that I knew what he was saying,” she recalled.

When Davis asked if she was offended by his desire to keep things lowkey, Taylor laughed it off.

“I wasn’t offended because I was equally — talking about secrets —  I wanted this to feel like a secret for me, in a way,” she replied. “I didn’t want people to be intrigued or have opinions. I wanted it to be our thing. So I felt it was mutual.”

Taylor shared that from there, things moved pretty quickly. The couple spent a whirlwind few weeks together before Stiller went off to shoot a new project in New York. Knowing that he would be gone for three months, they kept things casual and “loose” when his departure day arrived, only for Stiller to reach out within 24 hours. 

“He landed in New York and the next day, he was in Central Park, and I got a call,” Taylor said. “He was like, ‘So do you think you’d ever wanna, like, come and visit in the next week?'”

They eventually made their first public appearance together at the June 1999 MTV Movie Awards and were married less than a year later, in May 2000. The couple — who separated in 2017 before coming back together during the pandemic — share two children, daughter Ella Olivia and son Quinlin.

Listen to Taylor’s full appearance on Are You a Charlotte? above.