Melanie Lynskey Recalls Not Realizing She Was Engaged to Jason Ritter

Melanie Lynskey wasn’t aware Jason Ritter was proposing to her when he first popped the question.

During an appearance on April 29’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the host, 49, commented on Lynskey’s new engagement ring, despite her and Ritter, 44, tying the knot in 2020.

Calling Ritter’s initial proposal at the end of 2016 “so confusing,” the Yellowjackets star, 46, explained, “I didn’t know what was happening … the day before I had been looking at rings and I tried one on and I was like ‘Oh, kind of looks like an engagement ring almost. I don’t think I’m going to get it.’ ”

“So then, he got me this ring, so I was like, ‘Oh, thanks!’ It didn’t sort of cross my mind,” she went on, adding that there was “this strange speech” after Ritter handed over the ring.

“We were just sort of sitting there, he had paused whatever, The Bachelor, and I was just sort of like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And I was like, ‘We’re not breaking up?’ He was like, ‘No, No, No!’ So I said, ‘Okay,’ and then I was like, ‘Well, thank you … lovely, good chat!’ ” Lynskey, who announced their engagement in Feb. 2017, recalled.

“Then three days later, we went to meet his family for Christmas and he said, ‘We’re engaged!’ I said, ‘Are we? Oh!’ It was so confusing. I didn’t know … I was like, ‘Do I tell my friends?’ And he said, ‘Of course!’ ” the Coyote Ugly star continued. 

“But it was so confusing, and then I said, ‘That’s not usually what a proposal is like. People usually understand that it’s happening,’ ” she pointed out.

Ritter has apparently been trying to make up for it ever since and has been “very cute” and proposing to Lynskey “over and over,” she told Fallon.

“Which is very sweet, and he did one on my birthday in Slovakia that was so cute. He gave me all these little gifts and was going to take me out for dinner and do it at dinner but our daughter was like, ‘Give her the ring, dad! Where’s the ring? That’s the big present!’ ” she added.

Lynskey and Ritter, who welcomed their daughter in December 2018, met while costarring in 2013 film The Big Ask. They married in a small, private ceremony on their front porch in Atlanta with just two friends in attendance, Ali Ahn and William Jackson Harper. 

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Lynskey previously said in a May 2022 interview with SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle that the couple exchanged vows because she’d been told Ritter wouldn’t be able to be with her while she was filming Yellowjackets in Canada.

“Honestly, I got married because someone was like, ‘Jason won’t get into Canada unless you’re married,’ which just wasn’t true,” she said at the time. “I was going to Canada for Yellowjackets, and I was on the phone with somebody, and they said, ‘Oh, he won’t be allowed in.’ And I was like, ‘We have a child. What? I can’t leave for six months.’ So, I was like, ‘We have to get married tomorrow.’ ”

“We got married on our front porch of our little rental house in Atlanta,” Lynskey — who was previously married to actor Jimmi Simpson from 2007 to 2014 — shared. “It was actually a very fun wedding day, but it didn’t need to happen. He could totally have gotten into Canada.”

Lynskey and Ritter have worked together multiple times over the years. They also both starred in 2014’s We’ll Never Have Paris and 2016’s The Intervention.