Celebs Who Got Busted Cheating: Remember when Meg Ryan hooked up with Russell Crowe? How about that sizzling on-screen romance between Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford? Here are the celebs who took rehearsing their love scenes to a whole other level.
Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon
Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon’s eight-year marriage crumbled shortly after rumors swirled that he was cheating with his Stop-Loss co-star Abbie Cornish. Phillippe has chalked the demise of the relationship up to being very young when he and Reese got married.
He also laughed off the question of whether his alleged affair caused the split, saying in an interview with People, “I had difficulties in my relationship, and in my marriage, long before I ever met her.” But according to Us Weekly, Phillippe never tried to hide the fact that he was having a fling with Cornish, by having public make-out sessions, and Cornish openly coming and going from his apartment.
So that probably didn’t help too much with his marriage difficulties. Not to mention, he and Cornish ended up staying together for four years. Witherspoon has described their divorce as humiliating, but never publicly called her ex out for cheating.
After that, she rebounded with Rendition co-star Jake Gyllenhaal before settling down again with her now-husband, the Hollywood agent Jim Toth.
Marilyn Manson and Evan Rachel Wood
How did a guy like Marilyn Manson end up in a love triangle with a pair of stunners like Dita Von Teese and Evan Rachel Wood? Well, that’s allegedly what happened when Manson stepped out on Von Teese, his then-wife, with Wood, his co-star in a never-released horror film inspired by the work of English children’s author Lewis Carroll.
After their divorce, Manson and Von Teese took turns slamming each other in the press. Manson spoke openly about his near-suicidal depression during the relationship, which he blamed on Von Teese’s supposedly unreasonable expectations of him.
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Von Teese told The Telegraph that it was Manson’s partying and, quote, “relationship with another girl” that led to the demise of their marriage. As Manson said in a 2007 Rolling Stone interview, in which he heavily implied an affair with Wood, “She picked up a butcher’s knife and said, ‘Here, you can stab me.’ When someone was willing to drown with me, I really didn’t want to drown anymore.”
Chad Michael Murray and Paris Hilton
Chad Michael Murray met Sophia Bush on the set of One Tree Hill in 2003. The co-stars fell in love and were married by 2005. But then Murray went to work on a horror movie called House of Wax, which literally marketed itself on the fact that Paris Hilton gets brutally murdered in it.
Well, apparently the appeal of Paris Hilton was too great for Murray to resist as well. According to a claim made by former Backstreet Boy, Nick Carter, who was dating Hilton at the time, Murray allegedly hooked up with her while shooting the movie.
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“So hot.” Bush filed to have the marriage annulled just five months after they said their vows, but she and Murray awkwardly worked together on the show for another five years. Bush later shaded her marriage to Murray, by essentially saying that they should never have been in a relationship, to begin with.
Murray would go on to date and eventually get engaged to an extra from One Tree Hill, Kenzie Dalton, only to break it off with her after 7 years. After that relationship went bust, he began dating another co-star, Nicky Whelan, whom he met on the set of the 2014 film Left Behind. Murray would eventually go on to marry actress Sarah Roemer in 2015.
Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz
Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz are notoriously press-shy. So it comes as no surprise that neither has spoken about how they fell in love on the set of Dream House in 2010.
It probably also has a bit to do with the fact that Weisz was engaged to director Darren Aronofsky, while Craig had a fiancee of his own, producer Satsuki Mitchell. Both stars announced splits from their significant others in November of 2010, with Weisz’s statement carefully adding that she and Craig had been separated for months.
That claim, however, became dubious when the pair spent Christmas together a month later. Then everyone’s eyebrows really shot back up when Craig and Weisz quietly married in June of 2011. That would be moving fast for anyone, let alone two people fresh off of almost decade-long failed engagements.
John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer
John Malkovich hooked up with Michelle Pfeiffer while they were shooting Dangerous Liaisons in 1988. We’ll just start off with the obvious questions: What? How? Why? Okay, that’s three questions to which there aren’t really answers, but this one is at least no rumor.
According to The New York Times, director Stephen Frears confirmed that when the affair happened, Malkovich was going through a difficult time over the breakup of his marriage. Obviously, they didn’t stay together, and in fact, Malkovich actually disappeared for a couple of years after both the affair and his marriage ended.
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Decades later, the unendingly quirky Malkovich reflected on the affair to Esquire, saying, “It’s hard to believe Michelle Pfeiffer ever said hello to me…But I sort of blacked it out. What I’m trying to say is, when I think of the other person, I don’t think of me as involved with them.
They’re uncorrupted by me. As if they were never troubled by my existence.” We honestly have no clue what that means, but it makes about as much sense as John Malkovich getting it on with Michelle Pfeiffer.
Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe
Really can’t stress enough how weird that is. Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe’s high-profile affair started in the spring of 2000 on the set of the action-thriller Proof of Life. The on-set affair also accelerated the end of Ryan’s already troubled marriage to actor Dennis Quaid, according to People.
Within months of the affair hitting the tabloids, Ryan and Quaid announced their separation and filed for divorce. Ryan’s brief relationship with Crowe was the subject of intense media scrutiny, most of which Ryan largely ignored.
She did tell Harper’s Bazaar that there were times she wanted to set the record straight about what happened, but ultimately never followed through. It wasn’t until years later, in 2008, that Ryan finally opened up to Insight, by basically saying that Quaid cheated on her, too.
Crowe was always characteristically unabashed in his public statements about the whole affair, once telling The Guardian, “The ending of Meg’s prior relationship had nothing to do with me.”
Carrie Fisher’s Star Wars’ affairs
Long before stanning was a thing, fans of the original Star Wars trilogy in the ’70s and ’80s stanned for the coupling of two of the films’ most dynamic and good-looking characters: space rogue Han Solo and freedom fighter Princess Leia.
In that cinematic universe, they did get together, and they had a son who grew up to be the evil Kylo Ren. In real life, the actors who portrayed Han and Leia, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher, enjoyed a brief but torrid affair. Just weeks before her death in 2016,
Fisher spoke about her previously unknown three-month entanglement with her co-star, who was 14 years her senior and a married dad with two kids. Fisher told People, “It was so intense…It was Han and Leia during the week, and Carrie and Harrison during the weekend.”
The first time the two used the Force on each other, so to speak, was after a birthday party for director George Lucas in 1976 while filming the first Star Wars movie. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ford wasn’t so forthcoming about the tryst.
Finally opening up about his ex-lover’s memoir to GQ in 2017, the legendary Millennium Falcon pilot simply said, “It was strange. For me.” Ford then declined to elaborate further other than to say he hadn’t read Fisher’s book.
Claire Danes and Billy Crudup
In 2003, filming began on Stage Beauty, a period piece about the 17th century London theater scene. Billy Crudup starred as a real-life actor named Ned, while Claire Danes portrayed Maria, his dresser turned acting nemesis.
When the cameras weren’t rolling, the relationship between Crudup and Danes was significantly more cordial, as they fell hard for each other. Danes said on The Howard Stern Show in 2015, “I was just in love with him, and needed to explore that…I was 24.
I didn’t quite know what those consequences would be.” One major bit of fallout suffered at the beginning of what would ultimately be a four-year romance. Crudup picked Danes over his girlfriend, Weeds star Mary-Louise Parker, who was seven months pregnant with his baby at the time.
In her memoir, Dear Mr. You, Parker wrote a letter to an unidentified party, which many assumed was Crudup, because of lines like, quote, “I am alone. Look, see? I am pregnant and alone. It hurts to even breathe.”
LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian
According to E! News, in 2001, Eddie Cibrian, an actor best known for his role on the moderately popular NBC first responders’ drama Third Watch, married future Real Housewife Brandi Glanville, who was a catalog and commercial model at the time.
By 2008, they were the parents of two boys, and Cibrian jetted off to shoot the made-for-TV mystery movie Northern Lights. His co-star was former child country music prodigy LeAnn Rimes, who was taking on her first big acting role.
Rimes was also married, but she and Cibrian clearly felt a connection, and celebrity news sources reported they were having an affair. The pair denied anything was going on, but in August 2009, Cibrian filed for divorce.
A week later, Rimes announced her plans for a divorce, and then took a Mexican vacation with Cibrian. In a joint November 2010 interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts, both Cibrian and Rimes finally copped to the affair.
He said, “The truth is that we’re human beings…We make mistakes and we learn from them, but we’re human. We fell in love.” Rimes was even more direct, admitting, “You had two couples whose marriages didn’t work who really stumbled upon each other and fell in love.”
Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie
Cibrian and Rimes got married in 2011, and are still together. After a decade of small roles in big movies and big roles in small movies, Billy Bob Thornton found stardom in 1997 when he won an Academy Award for writing Slide Blade.
In April 1997, Billy Bob’s fourth wife filed for divorce, alleging multiple instances of domestic violence, which Billy Bob, quote “vehemently denied,” according to People. Around the same time, Billy Bob met Laura Dern when both were guest-starring on the sitcom Ellen, although he also denied there was anything going on there, too.
Two years later, by which time Billy Bob and Laura were openly together, Billy Bob starred alongside rising star Angelina Jolie in the movie Pushing Tin. In the spring of 2000, Laura left Billy Bob to his own devices while she went to film something.
He took the opportunity to go public about his secret romance with Angelina, with the two stealing away to Las Vegas to get married. At the time, Thornton hadn’t yet split from Dern. Billy Bob later justified his decision to The Guardian, saying, “It made me happy and somebody else happy. I’m sorry it caused pain.” Nevertheless, he and Angelina divorced in 2003.
Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott
Married couple Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott have turned to document their lives for reality TV cameras into a cottage industry. After marrying in 2006, they’ve anchored Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood, Tori & Dean: Cabin Fever, and True Tori.
It was on a 2014 episode of the latter in which Spelling revealed all the details about how she and her husband found each other. During a discussion with a friend about McDermott’s extramarital affair, Spelling admitted her own relationship with McDermott began in adultery.
Spelling told Entertainment Tonight, “I mean, he was married…We had sex the first night we met.” The couple met in July 2005 on the set of the made-for-Lifetime Movie Mind Over Murder. At that point, both McDermott and Spelling were married to their first spouses.