Who Is Jenny Slate’s Husband, Ben Shattuck? Find Out How the Comedy Darling Found Romance
In I Want You Back, the new rom-com that premieres Friday, Feb. 11 on Prime Video, JennySlate plays Emma, a woman so heartbroken by a recent breakup that she teams up with a similarly heartbroken fella (played by CharlieDay) to sabotage their exes’ new relationships and win them back. It sounds a little bit like a rom-com version of Strangers on a Train, which is admittedly a bizarre mix, but it also seems to fit right in with Slate’s crowd-pleasingly eclectic career choices so far.
Slate, 39, has made a name for herself as a voice actress in both mainstream and indie animated features; in addition, her recurring guest spot as Mona-Lisa Saperstein on NBC’s hit show Parks & Recreation is still widely circulated in meme and gif form.
Meanwhile, her comedy special Stage Fright and collection of essays
After dealing with a very public on-again off again relationship with a certain Marvel A-lister (you know the one), Slate has been understandably cautious and quiet in her personal endeavors of late, maintaining a sense of control over what information is shared and what stays private. She and Shattuck were photographed canoodling together at a film festival in early 2019, but Slate didn’t open up in public interviews about their relationship until June; when she did, it was with a deluge of love and happiness. "I have this faith now—I do—that I can have this beautiful relationship with this man that I deeply love,” Slate told Refinery29’s Unstyled podcast. “That I can have a full life, that I can live on this peninsula in Massachusetts where I live right now, and have my career, and that I can feel beauty in myself in so many ways.”
Read on for more about Jenny Slate's storybook romance with husband Ben Shattuck.
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Who is Jenny Slate’s husband, Ben Shattuck?
Shattuck, 38, is an accomplished writer, artist, and curator. He graduated from Cornell University in 2009, and attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2013. His short story The History of Sound, about two men who fall in love during World War I, won the Pushcart Prize in 2019, and is currently being adapted into a feature film starring Normal People’s Paul Mescal and The Crown’s Josh O’Connor.
In addition to writing, Shattuck paints and has a number of art exhibitions under his belt. He's also the lead curator at his family’s art gallery in Massachusetts, Dedee Shattuck Gallery, and the director of a writers’ residency program on Cuttyhunk Island off of Cape Cod.
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How did Jenny Slate meet Ben Shattuck?
While it’s not known how Slate and Shattuck met or when they started dating, they were photographed looking very sweet and romantic together in January 2019 at the Sundance Film Festival, where Slate was doing press for her movie The Sunlit Night. Shattuck proposed to Slate in September 2019 while on vacation in France, and while their joint Instagram announcements paint the event as full of storybook, fairytale wonder, the story Slate told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show about it is appropriately hilarious and charming.
“The sun is setting, he’s holding my hand. He’s saying, you know, these beautiful things to me," she recalled on the talk show in November 2019. "And all of a sudden, he’s like, ‘Jenny, you mean so much to me. I love you so much.’ I’m like, ‘He’s about to propose to me! I can feel it coming!'”
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She continued, “I had a moment to kind of, like, calm myself. Like, could have been the Audrey Hepburn of the situation, like very demure. And he’s like, ‘Will you be my wife?’ And of course, at that moment, when I could’ve been like, ‘Yes,’ or whatever, I have somehow nervously stuffed, like, all of the sausage into my mouth and I’m like, ‘Bleh!'”
When did Jenny Slate get married?
Slate and Shattuck set three separate wedding dates in 2020, the first of which was in June, but the ongoing COVID pandemic meant each wedding had to be canceled. Tired of waiting, they married on New Year’s Eve 2021 in their living room. Slate ultimately preferred the intimate setting, telling Marie Claire, “We were planning on a [wedding] that ended up being almost 200 people, and then now, it’s just our parents and siblings. We each invited six friends… I actually like it. I like it better. I didn't realize how the large thing was making me feel uncomfortable, a little bit. Just a little.”
Who is Jenny Slate's ex-husband?
Slate was married to filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp from 2012 to 2016. While dating, they created the short Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, a three-minute stop-motion animated film about a tiny seashell talking about his life, with Slate providing Marcel’s voice. The video went viral on YouTube, had a theatrical debut at AFI FEST 2010 (where it won Best Animated Short) and won the Grand Jury and Audience Awards at the New York International Children’s Film Festival. Since then there have been two Marcel the Shell short sequels, a couple
Though the two separated in 2016, it was an amicable split. Slate told Vulture, “We’re good friends. That’s why we got divorced. If we didn’t get divorced, we wouldn’t be able to be friends and we wouldn’t be able to do our work. We had just grown apart, and we love each other. It wasn’t easy, but not bad. No, it was bad. But not essentially bad.”
After their divorce, Slate and Fleischer-Camp continued to work together on Marcel. Slate told Marie Claire, “In some ways, there are challenges that come up when you're working with someone, and your relationship is… making a big, big shift. But no… It certainly wasn't dramatic or fighting or something like that. This is both of our favorite piece of work, I think, that we do, and are doing, and have done. So, I think we just wanted to keep our eye on that. We never talked about it, but I feel like both of us understood the doing the work and doing it well.”
Were Jenny Slate and Chris Evans married?
Slate and Captain America star Chris Evans were in a relationship, on and off, from 2016 to 2018. They met in 2015 on the set of Gifted, in which Evans played the uncle and guardian to a child prodigy and Slate played her teacher. They became fast friends, but at the time Slate was still married to Fleischer-Camp. The two reportedly started dating after Slate separated from Fleischer-Camp in May 2016, broke up in February or March 2017, and reunited later that year. There were rumors in early 2018 that Slate and Evans were engaged, but nothing was ever confirmed, and they called it quits for good by March of that year. They remain good friends.
Does Jenny Slate have kids?
Slate and Shattuck have one child, a girl named Ida Lupine. Slate publicly announced her pregnancy in December 2020—live on Late Night With Seth Meyers!—when she was “about four days away” from her due date.
Slate revealed that she’d had the baby in February 2021, when Entertainment Tonight’s Katie Krause asked how her pregnancy was treating her. “How are you feeling?” asked Krause, to which Slate replied, “I feel fine! Yeah, I’m not pregnant anymore, the baby came out!” Motherhood, Slate followed up, has also been treating her well. “Being a mother is such a joy," she said. "It's so cliché but I love it."
