A far cry from her characters. Virgin River star Alexandra Breckenridge doesn’t have the dramatic love life of her characters but is instead living out her happily ever after with husband Casey Hooper.
On Virgin River, Breckenridge plays Mel, a widowed nurse who moves to a remote town and finds herself falling in love with Jack (Martin Henderson), a veteran who has his own traumatic past. The timing never seems quite right for these two — similar to her love story on This Is Us. From 2016 to 2022, she played Sophie, who takes decades to get the timing right with her childhood sweetheart, Kevin (Justin Hartley).
Breckenridge and Hooper, however, didn’t need decades to make it down the aisle. The pair met at a Grammys afterparty in 2012 and hit it off right away, first taking their romance public in June 2012 by packing on the PDA at red carpet premieres for the comedy Ted and documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me. (Hooper serves as the lead guitarist for the “Firework” singer’s live performances.)
After two years of dating, the actress and the musician got engaged in late 2014. They married the following year in a small ceremony in a field in Colorado among an intimate group of their loved ones.
It wasn’t long before they started a family of their own. They welcomed their first son, Jack, in 2016, and Breckenridge’s first labor went much quicker than Hooper expected.
“My water breaks at 5 in the morning — pop, I literally felt it break,” the American Horror Story alum explained during a March 2021 appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “Then the labor just started coming really fast. My husband’s like, ‘Watch TV, it’ll be hours, it’s your first baby.’ No, no, no.”
When they arrived at the hospital, doctors said the new mom was already 9 centimeters dilated. Breckenridge, who chose a water birth, said while her labor was only two hours, it was extremely painful since her son was about 9 pounds. The discomfort was enough to make her choose a different experience the second time she gave birth in 2017.
“When I got pregnant with my daughter, I got an epidural. I did. And it was a beautiful experience, magical,” Breckenridge joked. “I should have listened to my two friends; two of my best friends had babies and they were like, ‘Girl, get the epidural. Don’t be stupid. … You need the good drugs.'”
Plenty of her priorities have shifted since becoming a mother. “When you have children. It just changes what’s important to you,” she told Us in November 2017. “Trying to find time to keep up with my hair or my nails, they take me away from Jack. So I tend to put those things off.”
After welcoming their first two kids, the parents also decided against raising the little ones in Los Angeles and moved to an area outside of Atlanta, Georgia, where Breckenridge was filming The Walking Dead. The upbringing more closely resembles their own childhoods, with Breckenridge growing up in Connecticut and Hooper in Iowa.
“We wanted our children to grow up in a place where they could play and ride their bikes that didn’t feel like a big city,” the She’s the Man star told Atlanta Magazine in January 2019, noting that Hooper’s mother, interior designer Rebecca Cartwright, decorated their home.
Virgin River, however, took Breckenridge to Vancouver, where the Netflix series films. She gave Hooper props for holding down the fort while she’s working in Canada. “Luckily, I have an extremely supportive husband who’s an incredible father and has always been super hands-on with the kids. I think I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. But you know, it’s really tough,” she told Connecticut Magazine in July 2022 ahead of the show’s season 4 premiere.
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She continued: “Kids change rapidly, so you have to change with them. And now that my kids are 4 and 5, almost 6, they have to be in school. This upcoming season is going to look a lot different for us because the kids are going to need to stay in Georgia a majority of the time.”
Scroll down to see Hooper and Breckenridge’s relationship timeline:
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