The Simpsons star Yeardley Smith has married her fiancé Dan Grice - eight years after the couple first met when Smith was on a promotional visit to Springfield, Oregon and Grice was the local police detective assigned to protect her.
Smith and Grice, who married last month at their home in Los Angeles, share the story of their what-are-the-odds? romance in a new interview with US entertainment trade publication the Hollywood Reporter.
Smith told the Hollywood Reporter that in 2014 the city of Springfield, Oregon decided to honour its famous TV namesake with a mural for the show's 25th anniversary, as The Simpsons creator Matt Groening is from Portland, Oregon.
'The Simpsons' Star Yeardley Smith Marries Former Detective She Met During Springfield Appearance (Exclusive) https://t.co/kOsOce9yVm
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) July 13, 2022
The voice of Lisa Simpson was asked to go to the unveiling after the plan for the original guest, The Simpsons showrunner Al Jean, fell through.
Smith initially said no.
"The joke is that I really will do anything for my show but I didn't really want to do it," she recounted. "They came back and said, 'Oh, please? Somebody has to go'."
Having "eventually" agreed to go, Smith was met by Grice at the airport. He had agreed to take on the weekend job, as he wanted his married colleagues to enjoy their time with their families.
"The captain said it was Yeardley Smith," Grice told the Hollywood Reporter. "Her name rang a bell but it wasn't until later that morning that I got a printout with her photo.
"I saw it and knew exactly who she was because I remember her from The Legend of Billie Jean and Maximum Overdrive. I didn't know that she happened to be the voice of Lisa Simpson."
"He was respectful without being fawning," said Smith of their first encounter. "He was not overly impressed by me and I really admired his sense of self-assurance.
"It was about a 23-minute ride from the airport to the hotel and during that time, I found out if he was married, divorced, had any children or a girlfriend. The answer was no, no, no, no."
By the time Smith had to return to Los Angeles, she had given Grice her phone number - under the pretense of him sending her a photo of his recent visit to Singapore.
"I'm pretty smooth," said Smith.
"By the time I land, he texted me that picture. Dan's actually a really good photographer. I thanked him for waiting at the gate and told him that I thought he was really interesting. He texted back, 'I think you're really interesting, too'. At that point, I thought we were done because how are we going to start a relationship being 850 miles away."
Fate, however, had other plans.
"A week later, I'm in Los Angeles, and Dan texted to say, 'I really wish you'd asked me to dinner', which was so sweet. We kept texting and then we started to talk on the phone. Because I'm a person who leaps and then looks, I said, 'Hey, why don't you come down to Los Angeles?' for [The Simpsons] dates at the Hollywood Bowl."
Grice did. A long-distance relationship began, he moved to Los Angeles in 2016 and in August 2018 the couple became engaged.
June 11th, 2022 ♥️🎂💒 pic.twitter.com/C5aPc7HiTK
— Yeardley Smith (@YeardleySmith) June 14, 2022
"She's got one of the biggest hearts that I've ever encountered," said Grice.
"That first drive from the airport to her hotel, I remember as she was interrogating me, I looked over at her in the passenger's seat and she gave me this smile. I mentioned this in our wedding vows, but at that moment, her eyes captured me and I really look back on that as the moment she kind of owned me."
"I often say that I'm sort of in awe, amazed and get a giggly feeling when I think about it because Dan didn't want to go to this event and I didn't want to go to this event but something bigger than us was like, 'No, no, listen, you two are going to meet and it's going to work out. You just have to have faith'," concluded Smith.
"We've seen it in movies and you always wonder, 'Wouldn't it be great if life was like that?' Sometimes it is."
