Celebs Who Dated Before They Got Famous

It's hard to imagine certain celebs together, but A-listers, just like the rest of us, have romantic pasts. Sometimes these relationships extend beyond their time in the limelight ... meaning that some stars dated one another before they became household names! Before they became famous, many of these couples were totally adorable (like actors Liam Neeson and Helen Mirren, who still make our hearts swell today), while others clearly wouldn't have worked out in the long run (Christine Taylor and Neil Patrick Harris were decidedly mismatched). Others like David Gallagher of 7th Heaven and gorgeous movie star Megan Fox, well, we just can't seem to wrap our heads around them together.

If you can believe it, all of these pairings actually happened before these stars hit it big ... even if some of the couples involved would rather forget that they did. Here's looking at you, January Jones and Ashton Kutcher.

Actress Megan Fox began dating her now-husband, Beverly Hills, 90210 star and former teen heartthrob Brian Austin Green, when she was 18 years old and he was 30, but, before that, she was in a much more age-appropriate relationship with a fellow young actor. Long before Fox became a household name with the 2007 Transformers movie, she had a role in the TV series Hope & Faith, starring Faith Ford and Kelly Ripa, and a small part in a 2001 direct-to-DVD Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen flick called Holiday in the Sun, among other tiny gigs. During this period of her career, Fox dated 7th Heaven actor David Gallagher, who played Simon Camden on the '90s family-friendly series following a minister and his large family. According to E! News, Gallagher and Fox were an item from 2003 to 2004, when she was 17 to his 18.

Could there possibly be a funnier couple than Conan O'Brien and Lisa Kudrow? The Friends star revealed that she and Coco dated before they each hit it big in television. She revealed to More magazine that she and O'Brien dated briefly but were better off as — wait for it — friends (via the New York Daily News). They were such good pals, in fact, that she said she credits him with her sticking it out in improv classes when she wasn't too thrilled with them.

"He was really smart, really funny, and he thought I was funny," she recalled. Regarding improv, she added, "I was embarrassed. Everyone was trying too hard." He convinced her to join the Los Angeles-based improv group the Groundlings, and she, as we all know, later became a TV legend playing Friends' Phoebe Buffay.

And O'Brien might be just as indebted to Kudrow for getting his start in late night television, which she confirmed to The Saturday Evening Post. "I was very encouraging. I remember saying, 'If Letterman's leaving his late-night show, he's irreplaceable. So better it be someone we don't know at all.' So I thought he should look into it."

Back when pop star Katy Perry was still a fledgling Christian singer in the early 2000s, she dated Christian pop-punk artist Matt Thiessen, frontman of the band Relient K (via E! News). "I used to date her back in the day for a couple of years. But we're still really good friends," Thiessen told Songfacts, adding, "We're not too close, but yeah, she's a great person." He added that she became a star while he was working with Owl City, noting, "While I was working on this Owl City stuff, she was hitting the cover of Cosmo. And then, all of a sudden, it's a couple months later and he's charting and radio success and all this stuff. And I'm like, that's really cool. Two of my friends have just become really popular in a short amount of time."

Perry was such a supportive girlfriend to Thiessen that video footage resurfaced a decade later of her failing epically to stage-dive at a Relient K show. The two even wrote the song "Long Shot" together, which was eventually recorded by Kelly Clarkson for her All I Ever Wanted album.

January Jones dated Ashton Kutcher before hitting it big as Betty Draper on Mad Men, and there were rumors for years that he was the subject of a remark she made in a 2009 GQ profile about an ex. In the article (via E! News), Jones griped that her first boyfriend since moving to Los Angeles "was not supportive of my acting." She said, "He was like, 'I don't think you're going to be good at this.'  So — f**k you! He only has nice things to say now — if anything, I should thank him. Because the minute you tell me I can't do something, that's when I'm most motivated."

Years later, Jones appeared on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, where a caller asked, "January, have you ever talked to Ashton Kutcher since he said you couldn't act, and what do you think about his acting skills?" Jones replied, "Ooh, ouch ... I said that someone I had dated previously wasn't encouraging of my acting — not that I couldn't. I don't know if that person had ever actually seen me act, but the person who wrote the interview did the math and thought it might be him, so I never really said who it was."

Jones never confirmed that Kutcher was the jerk in question, but she added, "I haven't talked to him, but I'm super happy for him and his family, to be political and all that."

When Melissa Joan Hart was first rising to fame on Sabrina the Teenage Witch in 1996, she had then-unknown actor Ryan Reynolds smitten. She revealed on Chelsea Lately (via the Daily Mail) that he tried to win her over with a Beluga watch, telling host Chelsea Handler, "He was 17 and I was, like, 19. I was like, 'You're too young for me.' ... I wasn't sure so I just grabbed him and started kissing him. You get a piece of jewelry like that, you gotta make out with the guy!"

It was just a fling for Hart, though, who says she had a boyfriend at the time. She told Australia's Studio 10, "He was sweet — he was very sweet. ... We were smitten and cute." She added, "[Reynolds] probably would have been a great boyfriend, and I didn't end up with the other guy, so maybe I should have taken a chance."

Celebs Colin Hanks and Busy Philipps dated when they were classmates at Loyola Marymount University in the 1990s, and they're still close friends today. In fact, in 2017, Philipps was a guest co-host on Live With Kelly when Hanks was a guest on the show and gushed about their prior relationship. "He was my college boyfriend!" she said. "We are very very close friends now — his wife and I are very tight, he and my husband hang out. We go on vacation together." The two met when Philipps was 18 and Hanks was 19. 

After noting that they'd known each other for 20 years, Philipps shared, "I do have moments where I think, 'How cool that we knew each other at this formative moment in our lives.'" Hanks added, "We got our first televisions shows within the same week. We got our first movies within the same week. We were able to go through all of these really special moments in young actors' lives together."