Kate Hamill, a New York-based playwright and actress, recalled the drama that unfolded as she was introduced to Jason O’Connell in July 2011 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, N.Y. It was shortly before Mr. O’Connell went onstage to perform in “Around the World in 80 Days.”
“I was dating someone else at the time, but when I shook hands with Jason, a bell went off in my head,” said Ms. Hamill, 36. “I’m not someone who previously believed in that kind of moment.”
After Ms. Hamill praised Mr. O’Connell’s work later that day — “He was simply brilliant,” she said — she parted ways feeling a bit uneasy, having been wowed at the first sight of a man whom she had never met, while already in a relationship.
“There wasn’t much I could do about it,” she said. “So I simply ignored the bell, I put it out of mind and just let it go.”
But she couldn’t ignore Mr. O’Connell, or let him go that easily.
Instead, they became fast friends, and Mr. O’Connell, a veteran stage actor from Huntington, N.Y., had a critique of Ms. Hamill even better than the one she gave him.
“Kate was so beautiful,” he said. “She also seemed so smart and funny, and I was already familiar with her writing, which was extremely clever.”
Mr. O’Connell, 49, who recently starred in “Judgment Day,” a play at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, added: “She was certainly someone I really wanted to get to know.”
He was given that opportunity when Ms. Hamill went about the business of making him her leading man, but only in the world of theater.
At that point, Ms. Hamill said she was starting to write her first play, a contemporary adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility.” “Though Jason and I were just friends,” she said, “he kind of stuck in my mind, and I started writing this role for him where he would play my brother-in-law, and I also gave him the first shot at reading for the part.”
Mr. O’Connell was thrilled.
“When someone as talented as Kate trusts that you have the kind of theatrical range to pull that off, well, it’s both intriguing and exciting.”
Mr. O’Connell would eventually be awarded the role in “Sense and Sensibility,” and soon landed a better one in October 2012, as Ms. Hamill’s real-life boyfriend.
“I asked her out immediately after her relationship ended,” he said. “She was someone who I knew for sure would make my world a better place.”
The actress Vaishnavi Sharma, who introduced the couple, said “what made them work so well from the start is that Kate allowed her most extreme self to be seen by Jason, which is beautiful, and not something you see in every relationship.”
Before they began dating, Mr. O’Connell, who was living in Washington Heights, said that he and Ms. Hamill, then living on the Lower East Side, didn’t see much of each other and “were mostly connected by social media.”
“But once we started spending more time together, I realized that not only was she brilliant and hysterically funny, but she was incredibly kind, loving and supportive,” said Mr. O’Connell, who moved in with Ms. Hamill to an apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, in 2015.
“I had never been in a relationship with someone who was so supportive of me both personally and professionally,” he said. “There’s just something about being with Kate that makes everything seem possible.”
Ms. Hamill, who is currently starring in her own adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” an Off Broadway production running at the Classic Stage Company, that she described as “a feminist revenge fantasy,” was equally thrilled to be dating Mr. O’Connell.
“Jason is so unbelievably talented, he’s the best actor I know, bar none,” she said. “He also has the biggest heart of anyone I know, he cares so deeply about people, and that’s why he has about a million friends who adore him and would do anything for him.”
In February, the couple, who consider themselves business partners, will have to deal once again with one of the more difficult aspects of their careers: traveling, on separate assignments. Mr. O’Connell has to leave town to direct a play for three weeks and then to go act in a play for another six weeks. Ms. Hamill will be traveling even more in the coming days, as she will be at three world premieres in the next four months.
“We both know that is a part of the lifestyle we both signed up for, and we are extremely supportive of each other going away in order to make our careers work,” Ms. Hamill said. “We never want to hold each other back, ever.”
Mr. O’Connell said it’s “all a part of being intimately connected, not just as friends but as collaborators, because when we are away, working on things, the other person is still very much a part of that collaboration.”
“I don’t feel comfortable making any choice, whether it’s acting, writing or directing, unless Kate likes it,” he said. “Then I know I’m on the right track.”
Ms. Hamill was born in Charleston, S.C., and lived there until she was four before her parents, Monica Joyce Hamill and Paul Hamill, both grant writers, moved the family to Lansing, N.Y. There, they raised Ms. Hamill and her siblings in an 1850s farmhouse on a dairy farm.
Ms. Hamill graduated from Ithaca College with a bachelor of fine arts degree in acting. Her parents eventually divorced.
“There was in my extremely small upstate New York School system a theater program that I just fell in love with,” Ms. Hamill said. “I was a very small, high-energy emotional child, and from a really young age, I was just hooked on theater, I just knew that’s what I was going to do with my life.”
Mr. O’Connell, who graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in theater from Hofstra University, did not have as calculated a plan to work professionally in theater.
“At first I thought I would become a cartoonist,” said Mr. O’Connell, the only son of Marie Favale, a retired painter, and Walter O’Connell, a former commercial artist. His parents divorced when he and his sister, Tiffany, were very young, leaving them to be raised with the help of their grandparents, Philomena and Eugene Favale.
Mr. O’Connell’s path to stage acting and writing took stronger root in a childhood love of reading and creating “homemade comic books and magazines,” as he called them. Mr. O’Connell would distribute his works, which would take entire summers to produce, to his high school classmates at the start of every school year, “and just watch them laugh and laugh and laugh,” he said.
As big a fan of Alfred E. Neuman as he was of Paul Newman, Mr. O’Connell said that while he grew up watching old movies on television and frequenting theaters, he was also “obsessed with Mad Magazine in those days,” as well as comic books that featured action heroes, Batman a particular favorite, which would become the inspiration later in life for Mr. O’Connell’s autobiographical one-man show, “The Dork Knight.”
At some point during his comic book and magazine phase, Mr. O’Connell, whose father died in 2007, began mimicking the voices of characters on “Saturday Night Live,” and, soon after, other voices, which got him more immediate laughs, and the kind of instant gratification that led him to do standup routines in comedy clubs on the same Long Island circuit where Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld and Rosie O’Donnell had performed.
“Doing my standup routines led to some theatrical writing and later, roles in various plays,” Mr. O’Connell said. “And then Kate came along and changed my life.”
“With her, I’m more of an adult than I’ve ever been, and at the same time, I’m as much of a child as I’ve ever been,” he said.
Ms. Hamill, who later chose Mr. O’Connell to be her love interest in a lively adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” which ran from June 2017 to early January 2018, said it was Mr. O’Connell who changed her life for the better.
“My career really took off after being with Jason because he is the most supportive partner humanly imaginable,” she said. “He always encourages me to go after challenges that scare me, and when I struggle to believe in myself, Jason always believes in me.”
They were married Jan. 20 at the Brooklyn Winery before Gabra Zackman, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, and about 150 guests.
One of them, Fred Berman, a longtime friend of the groom who served as best man and is currently Timon in the cast of “The Lion King,” said of the newlyweds: “They support each other and truly inspire each other, and ever since Jason met Kate, he has had this creative fire, and I think that goes both ways.”
Ms. Sharma, the maid of honor, agreed.
“Kate and Jason dream big,” she said. “But ever since they began dreaming together, they have achieved so much in this world, and I know that they will continue that success.”
On This Date
Where The Brooklyn Winery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
When Jan. 20, 2020
Toothache and Heartache Two months into dating the bride, the groom had a wisdom tooth removed and was given powerful painkillers. “He was really out if it,” the bride said. “I made him soup and just as he was about to fall asleep, he rolled over and asked, “Will you marry me?”
Still Doesn’t Do Windows The bride lived with two other women when she began dating the groom, and “he became our de facto roommate,” she said, laughing, “but he always did the dishes.”
Movie Trivia Fred Berman, the best man, said that while “the groom is a huge nerd who loves science fiction, superheroes and pop culture, he’s also a major movie buff who can tell you the year, month, and usually the exact week when a movie was released.”
Who Ya Gonna Call? Ms. Hamill said that her adaptation of “Dracula” is “in homage to “Ghostbusters,” as it is both scary and funny, and as I am a child of the 80s.”
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