Seeing double? Lauren Graham admitted that she once mixed up Dax Shepard, her former costar and current neighbor, for Brad Pitt.
“He was coming up the street in a car and I was driving down the street,” the Gilmore Girls alum, 52, said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Thursday, February 13. “And he waved at me and I went, ‘That’s Brad Pitt!’”
Graham continued, “For whatever reason, I thought it was Brad Pitt. And he rolled down the window and I said, ‘I thought you were Brad Pitt,’ and he said ‘I love you forever.’”
The Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist actress noted the mishap was the moment she knew the duo would “be friends until we die.” She also detailed what it’s like to be neighbors with the 45-year-old CHiPs star, who shares daughters Lincoln, 6, and Delta, 5, with wife Kristen Bell.
“It’s just so fun. Our neighborhood is fun and doing Parenthood with him was really fun,” she explained. “He and [our Parenthood costar] Peter [Krause], my boyfriend, go on hikes together, which is adorable. He has two girls and they have a real tough-guy looking Jeep kind of thing — a jeep for kids that they drive around the neighborhood.”
She added, “Dax is often out doing his own handyman work. … He’s got, like, a cut-off shirt and, you know, all his tattoos. He’s really that guy.”
Graham and Shepard starred on Parenthood as two of four of the Braverman siblings along with Krause, 54, and Erika Christensen. The NBC drama, which ran for six seasons from 2010 to 2015, followed the Braverman siblings navigating the ups and downs of being parents in their California hometown.
Craig T. Nelson, Mae Whitman, Bonnie Bedelia, Monica Potter, Sam Jaeger, Joy Bryant, Miles Heizer, Sarah Ramos and Max Burkholder also starred.
Not only did appearing on Parenthood bring Graham lifelong friendships, it also brought love into her life with Krause, who she began dating in 2010. She opened up about the formation of their romance on the set of Parenthood while speaking to Good Housekeeping in December 2016, where she revealed why they work as a couple.
“We couldn’t stop talking. Not about ourselves, but about the world and books and family,” she said of the Six Feet Under actor. “Once we got together, there was no game play. It was like, ‘You like me, and I like you.’ It gave me an understanding of life: This is how things happen, and it’s completely random.”
