kelly mark!

Love, Laughter & Working Side by Side 

- ELIZABETH LEONARD

Kelly Ripa took one look at the smoking-hot guy in the headshot, and she saw her future. No matter that they’d not yet met in the flesh, much less talked or kissed. “I’m a very practical person, but there was something about him,” says Kelly of the moment in 1994 when the casting director for All My Children showed her a photo of Mark Consuelos, then a 24-year-old budding actor up for a role opposite Kelly, already one of the soap’s breakout stars. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s my person. This is my husband. My future hubs.’ I just knew it.”

As fate would have it, Mark got the gig and the girl. The pair eloped to Vegas 20 months after Kelly first spied the headshot, now tucked away in a keepsake box alongside their marriage license and other cherished mementos. Over 28 years, Kelly, 52, and Mark, 52, built a family—they share kids Michael, 25, Lola, 21, and Joaquin, 20—and thriving individual careers. But now, 22 years after Kelly joined Regis Philbin on Live With Regis and Kelly and helped make Live the No. 1-rated daytime talk show it is today, Mark is getting in on the action. The Riverdale alum will take over for Ryan Seacrest in the chair beside his wife on the newly retitled Live With Kelly and Mark on April 17 and couldn’t be more excited. “I don’t take it lightly at all,” says Mark, who enjoyed a flood of congrats and support after the surprise announcement in February. (Jimmy Kimmel sent cigars.) “We’re super, super grateful.”