wednesday's child

Fred Armisen Secretly Married Riki Lindhome And They Welcomed a Baby—2 Whole Years Ago

Lindhome welcomed a son via surrogate just weeks after she and Armisen began dating, she told People.
Image may contain Fred Armisen Riki Lindhome Clothing Coat Jacket Blazer Accessories Glasses Fashion and Adult
Fred Armisen and Riki Lindhome attend the 4th Annual Cinema Unbound Awards on June 22, 2023 in Portland, Oregon.Ali Gradischer/Getty Images

Surprise, Fred Armisen is married—and has been for two years. He also has a child.

Actor Riki Lindhome revealed in an interview with People published Wednesday that she and Armisen recently marked a wedding anniversary so nice they celebrated it twice before making their marital status public, as they secretly tied the knot on June 1, 2022.

Lindhome said that she and Armisen had known each other for about a decade and a half before becoming a couple. While they were filming Netflix’s Wednesday together in Romania in 2021 and 2022—Armisen playing spooky Uncle Fester and Lindhome the perky therapist Dr. Valerie Kinbott—she realized that her feelings for her old friend had changed.

Her life circumstances had also shifted: Lindhome had a baby on the way via surrogate, utilizing a donated egg and sperm after struggling to get pregnant herself.

“I could tell I was having feelings, but then I was like, ‘Well, I can’t say anything because I’m about to have a baby,” she said.

She called the swift evolution of her relationship with Armisen “weird, crazy timing.”

“We were friends for so long that it just happened fast,” she said. “We had one dinner and then it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, let's see where this goes.’ It was surprising. I would say it was more of a shock to him. He did not see it coming at all.”

By Lindhome’s recollection, she told Armisen she loved him two weeks before her son Keaton’s birth on March 1, 2022. Armisen was still filming Wednesday abroad, and didn’t get to meet the baby for three weeks. She told him that if he didn’t want to raise the child with her, “it doesn’t make you a jerk. I’m not mad at you.”

“I told him, ‘So you just tell me what your heart says, and he said ‘Yes.’ It was just insta-family, basically.” They had only been officially dating for a few weeks.

She and Armisen moved in together, and when Keaton was three months old, got married in a three-minute ceremony at a courthouse. Lindhome wore a white sundress she bought at Macy’s. The rings they picked out didn’t come on time. They got ice cream after. The wedding, of course, was on a Wednesday.

“It's not a secret, but we didn’t really tell people,” Lindhome said of the wedding. “We didn’t announce it or anything. And we thought people would hear about it eventually. And that’s what happened, one friend at a time…I didn’t even tell my mom.”

“We also didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings by not having a wedding—and we didn’t want to get pressured into having one,” she added. “We just wanted to be like, ‘Guess what we did a few months ago?’”

This is Lindhome’s first marriage. Armisen was married to Sally Timms from 1998 to 2004 and Elisabeth Moss from 2009 to 2011. He was also linked to actor Natasha Lyonne for a number of years, from 2014 onward. In April 2022, she confirmed that they had broken up at some point prior, explaining, “I honestly think we broke up because I wanted a swimming pool.”

Lindhome told People that a friend had confided in her that she thought Lindhome and Armisen would end up together.

"I didn’t believe her, but she called it, which is funny,” she said. “The traditional way to land a man is not to have a baby by yourself and move to Romania.”