Alexis Bledel & Vincent Kartheiser Have Separated After 8 Years Of Marriage

After eight years of marriage, Alexis Bledel and Vincent Kartheiser have announced that they have gone their separate ways. A representative for the Gilmore Girls star confirmed to People that Kartheiser filed for divorce on Wednesday (Aug. 17) at New York’s Putnam County Court.

Bledel and Kartheiser met while filming Mad Men Season 5 in 2012. Bledel had a guest role as Beth Dawes, mistress to Kartheiser’s Pete Campbell. The cast and crew immediately saw a connection between them, especially Jon Hamm, who played Don Draper. “I did know he liked her from a very early point,” the actor told New York Magazine. “I was a supporter of that union.” The show’s creator Matthew Weiner said he knew “they would be great together” and predicted they’d “get married one day.”

They didn’t start dating straight away, though. “We were completely professional,” Kartheiser said. “We never saw each other out. We never — it was nothing, it was just work.”

The Handmaid’s Tale star praised Kartheiser’s personality and work ethic at the time, telling AMC (via HuffPost) that he’s “very, very different from Pete” and that he noticed her apprehension about their sex scenes. “[He] made it much better for me by just sort of making sure I felt comfortable,” she said. “He kind of helped me take the edge off a little bit by just being nice.” The actors officially started dating two months after they wrapped filming for Season 5.

The couple got engaged in March 2013 and were married in a private ceremony in June 2014. In the fall of 2015, they welcomed their first child, a baby boy, announcing the news almost a year later. The couple has always been very private about their relationship. When asked about Bledel during an interview with Vulture in 2014, Kartheiser quoted Ernest Hemingway: “You’ll lose it, if you talk about it.” The actor said this was something he “realised about the most important things in his life,” including his love life.

“If I share them with the world and I open that door to their fuming anger that they need to get out or in adoration that they want to flaunt, it lessens it. It cheapens it; it weakens it,” Kartheiser explained.