The couple that plays together, stays together! Melissa McCarthy and husband Ben Falcone look like they’re having a ball together in the July issue of Redbook. Posing with classic comedy props like Groucho glasses, a red clown nose, and giant Mickey Mouse gloves, the spouses of 10 years seem like the kind of people you’d want as your best friends.
“We have a great marriage, and outside forces can’t really change that,” the Tammy actress told the magazine of her relationship with Falcone, who has appeared in many of her movies, including Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Identity Thief. “Success doesn’t define us, even though we love what we do. The important thing is our family and kids.”
Married since 2005, the couple have two daughters together, Vivian, 7, and Georgette, 4. Their youngest is still pretty oblivious to her parents’ celebrity, but Vivian has started to catch on.
“She asked me, ‘Are you famous?'” McCarthy recalled. “And I said to her, ‘Famous doesn’t mean anything. Just because people know my face doesn’t mean they know us or that it makes us any more interesting or better.'”
The Mike & Molly star wasn’t always so grounded, though. “I see teenagers or people who are 21 and think, ‘I was an idiot at that age,'” she admitted to Redbook. “I was running around New York like a crazy woman. Thank God I only had three and a half cents to my name. I was too immature to handle success then.”
Her style wasn’t quite red-carpet-ready, either. “I wore white kabuki makeup, had blue-black hair,” McCarthy revealed of her college years. “At one point I shaved an inch and a half around my hairline and continued the white makeup up so it made my head look slightly deformed. I thought it was hilarious. I was in a little town and I just got a kick out of it.” She never really fit the “goth” persona, though. “I was never sullen,” she said. “I was a terrible punk—I was still so chatty.”
These days, the comedienne is much more savvy when it comes to personal style. She’s even starting her own plus-size clothing line for women—a move that was sparked, in part, by other designers’ refusal to dress her for awards shows.
“When I go shopping, most of the time I’m disappointed. Two Oscars ago, I couldn’t find anybody to do a dress for me,” she explained. “I asked five or six designers—very high-level ones who make lots of dresses for people—and they all said no.”