Molly McNearney says there was one dinner that made Jimmy Kimmel’s intentions impossible for her to miss, even if acting on them immediately felt professionally risky.
The longtime Jimmy Kimmel Live! executive producer and co-head writer revisited the beginning of their relationship with Kimmel during the August 24 episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert. Years after McNearney began working for Kimmel, he invited her to his house and served a meal built around foods she had casually named during a writers’ meeting months earlier.
In her latest retelling, McNearney remembered listing pizza, gnocchi, crab claws, a BLT and chocolate chip cookies. Roughly six months later, Kimmel remembered all five and prepared them for her, a gesture that prompted Shepard to ask whether she immediately understood that Kimmel was sexually interested in her.
She did and the realization made her both excited and uneasy. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, no. This is a bad idea,’” McNearney recalled in the conversation highlighted by Entertainment Weekly. “He was my boss.”
Kimmel’s Five-Food Dinner Made His Intentions Clear
McNearney called the dinner a “long play” because Kimmel had apparently held onto a small detail from an ordinary staff conversation for about six months. She said she had recently returned from Africa and went to Kimmel’s house after work, where he was going to help her with plans involving a classroom there. When he opened the door, she could immediately smell food.
“He’s like, ‘I’ve made some things,’” McNearney recalled. “He had remembered what my favorite foods were, and he made them all,” she said. When Shepard bluntly asked whether she immediately interpreted the elaborate meal as evidence Kimmel wanted their relationship to become sexual, McNearney answered yes. “It made me very excited and very nervous,” she said.
Kimmel joked during the conversation that his strategy amounted to challenging her to eat the gnocchi and then deny being interested.
McNearney Says the Power Imbalance Worried Her From the Start
McNearney’s hesitation centered on a fact neither of them could ignore. Kimmel was not simply a colleague she had developed feelings for. He was the host of the show where she had built her career and, professionally, her boss.
When Kimmel said he had not thought about the situation in quite the same way, McNearney replied, “The person in power usually doesn’t.” She said she repeatedly told him that beginning a relationship seemed like a “terrible idea” and described herself as “very skittish.” Her concern extended beyond whether the romance itself would succeed.
McNearney had already spent years advancing at Jimmy Kimmel Live!, after starting as a writer’s assistant in 2004 and eventually becoming co-head writer. “I just kept thinking, statistically, this is not going to work out and his life isn’t going to change but mine does,” she said. “And that’s what freaked me out. Because I had worked really, really hard.” Page Six also highlighted that portion of the conversation.
They Kept the Romance Quiet Inside the Writers’ Room
Once McNearney and Kimmel decided to pursue the relationship, they initially tried to keep it from changing the workplace around them.
McNearney said they did “a little bit of sneaking” and were “very, very quiet” during the early months. She was especially concerned about the writers’ room, which was predominantly male, and about losing the dynamic she had worked to establish with her colleagues. “I didn’t want it to change,” she said. “And it did.”
The concern was not new. McNearney discussed the same basic dilemma in a 2014 Glamour interview, saying that workplace relationships had never been on her mind when she first met Kimmel because “you don’t date your boss.” She also told Glamour that Kimmel’s home-cooked meal was the gesture that “sealed the deal.”
One small detail has changed between her retellings. In 2014, McNearney remembered her five foods as pizza, gnocchi, a BLT, crab claws and a cheeseburger, and said Kimmel made all five. On Armchair Expert in 2026, she listed chocolate chip cookies in place of the cheeseburger and remembered the dinner taking place about six months after the original conversation.
McNearney Says She Never Saw Kimmel That Way at First
McNearney recalled meeting Kimmel shortly after joining the show in 2004. An executive producer introduced her as the new assistant and mentioned that she competed in triathlons.
Kimmel’s response was hardly flirtatious. According to McNearney, he called doing triathlons “stupid,” leaving her intimidated rather than attracted to him. She told Shepard that she initially did not think of Kimmel romantically “at all.” Her opinion changed gradually as she watched the way he behaved with the people around him.
“But as I got to work with him for years, I really loved this guy,” McNearney said. She described him as someone who took care of his staff and family and concluded, “He’s just a good human being.”
They Still Work Together More Than 13 Years Into Their Marriage
She and Kimmel married on July 13, 2013, at the Ojai Valley Inn in Ojai, California. They later welcomed daughter Jane and son Billy, while Kimmel also has two adult children, Katie and Kevin, from his first marriage. Their professional partnership continued as well. ABC currently lists McNearney among the executive producers of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, alongside Kimmel, Erin Irwin, Jennifer Sharron and David Craig.
McNearney told Shepard that being married to the host still affects how consciously she behaves at work. She has no problem criticizing Kimmel in the writers’ room, but sometimes notices herself going too far in the opposite direction because she does not want colleagues to believe their marriage influences her professional judgment. She said she occasionally catches herself “overcorrecting” for exactly that reason.