Andrew Rannells Reveals New Details About His Months-Long Romance With Anderson Cooper in His 20s

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Andrew Rannells attends HBO Max
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Andrew Rannells is opening up about dating Anderson Cooper in the past.

The 48-year-old Tony Award-nominated actor previously revealed he had a brief romance with the 59-year-old journalist when he was 25 years old.

During the latest episode of the OMG Obsessed podcast with his Girls co-star Zosia Mamet, Andrew shared new details about dating Anderson.

Andrew Rannells performs during the 2026 Tony Awards

“I had just done Hairspray on Broadway and I was not well known at all, but I met him through friends and we dated off and on for about, I don’t know, the whole thing took about nine months,” the actor shared. “When I look back, it was really only… a pretty low number of meetings, but it did stretch over a sort of period of time.”

“He was super cool and so smart and would do things like call me from a satellite phone… and be like, ‘I was just thinking about you.’ And there would be helicopters going on behind him,” Andrew continued. “And I was like, ‘This is the greatest moment of my life.’ And then later I found out… I was very young and sort of thought, ‘I guess we’re in love.’ And he was maybe rolling calls on that satellite phone. There was maybe a few people he was checking in with… And I was so hurt that I was like, ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.’”

“So it ended, not badly, but it just fizzled out because then I went away to work.”

During another podcast appearance earlier this year, Andrew revealed that his short-lived romance with Anderson inspired the storyline for his character Elijah in Girls.

“I told Lena [Dunham] and [co-creator] Jenni Konner a story about when I was 25 that I had dated Anderson Cooper, and I told them about the experience and what that was like,” he explained.

“Then it became the story that Elijah had in the series,” he added.

Now, Andrew has been in a long-term relationship with fellow actor Tuc Watkins, who he met while performing in The Boys in the Band on Broadway back in 2018.

“We met and I felt like such a lazy actor that I fell in love with my co-star. I was like this is so cliché,” Andrew said on The Drew Barrymore Show in 2020. “Also have you seen him? He’s very attractive. What was I supposed to do? Not date him? It was strange. Like the first time we kissed it was for work… but it was weird, it was like, Oh we are getting paid to do this.”

The post Andrew Rannells Reveals New Details About His Months-Long Romance With Anderson Cooper in His 20s appeared first on Just Jared – Celebrity News, Entertainment News & Photos.

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