All About Lizzy Caplan’s Husband, Tom Riley

Actors Lizzy Caplan and Tom Riley met in 2015. By 2016, they were engaged. They were married a year later and went on to welcome a child in 2021. Though Caplan and Riley were open about their relationship quickly, they didn’t share much about the specifics, even with plenty of interview opportunities.

As Riley explained to The Telegraph in late 2016, they both have successful careers that they don’t necessarily want to mix with their relationship.

“The idea of being a ‘power couple’ or in a relationship that is a ‘brand’ is just so unappealing to me,” he said.

But some details of their romance and life together have been shared over the last decade. Here’s everything to know about Tom Riley and his relationship with Lizzy Caplan.

Riley is originally from England, growing up in Kent in a town called Maidstone, according to his website bio. He went to college at Birmingham University, studying English literature and drama. Riley had been interested in acting from a very young age and founded a theater company called Article 19 while still at Birmingham. Upon graduation in 2002, he headed to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art for more education. Riley went on to both direct and produce, as well as perform.

He had a leading role as Leonardo da Vinci in the Starz series Da Vinci’s Demons, for which he took home a best actor win at the 2014 BAFTA Cymru Awards. His other notable roles include parts in Ill Behaviour, Dark Heart, The Collection, The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, and The Nevers.

In an interview with Collider in 2018, Riley shared a bit about how he gets cast in roles and how that’s changed throughout his career, especially after starring in Da Vinci’s Demons.

“You get moved, in the heads of casting directors, into a place where you are in the leading male roles,” he explained. “That was not how I started my career, at all. My first jobs were as a working class northern guy with a chip on his shoulder, and an artistic art student. It was all like completely different stuff. The problem is that those kind of roles are very difficult to find in a lead. The peripheral characters tend to be the most interesting character parts. Trying to find those roles that would count as number one or two on the call sheet...is hard to find.”

He directed Caplan in a short film called The Toll Road, saying of the experience, “We were supposed to have three days to shoot this, but she refused to come to set for the first day because she didn’t like her character’s eyebrows so we lost a whole day. Regardless, she was a delight, excavating a side of her talents that she’s rarely been able to show off in her previous work. And as a producing partner, she’s both endlessly patient and a real source of creative inspiration. But obviously those day one eyebrows were magnificent and I mourn their loss.”

Caplan filmed the war drama Allied in London in 2015, which is where they first crossed paths. In a 2018 interview on This Morning, Riley shared a story about one of their early dates in Los Angeles, where he almost took his own eye out.

“I pulled up outside her house in L.A., and I wanted to have very clean breath,” Riley said, explaining he had Listerine in his glove box. He gargled and spat out of the car towards a cactus.

He continued, “As I spat, a needle went straight through my eyeball.”

He tried to play it off, but Caplan noticed the injury and that his pupil was leaking. At the doctor, he was told the injury was millimeters from causing blindness.

“There is nothing that solidifies the beginning of a new relationship more than having to put an eye patch on your boyfriend’s face every night before he falls asleep,” he joked.

They made their first public appearance as a couple together at the Prague Opera Ball in February 2016.

A few months after making their public debut, the couple got engaged. Caplan could be seen wearing her engagement ring in June 2016 at the Now You See Me 2 premiere.

They were married in 2017 on the Amalfi coast in Ravello, on Labor Day weekend. At the time, the local newspaper Il Vescovado reported a guest list that included Octavia Spencer, Lily Collins, Dianna Agron, James Marsden, Chris Hemsworth, and Dave Franco.

In 2021, the pair welcomed their son, Alfie. In 2022, while speaking to Grazia USA about her show Fleishman Is in Trouble, Caplan talked about becoming a mom.

“There are moments where you’re just watching this little person do a thing and you’re just beaming at him and you don’t even realize you’re beaming until maybe you see a picture of yourself watching him do this thing and you realize, ‘Oh my, I’m smiling so much right now,’” she gushed. “I was smiling without being totally aware that I’m smiling—it’s like this unrivaled pure joy.”

Of Riley and parenthood, she said. “We got a lot of life in before we had a kid, so we were both very ready to do this...And it’s just so much more mind-blowing and better than you could imagine before actually going through with it. That’s been our experience.”

In January 2022, Riley made an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, sharing that being a father “has its ups and downs,” describing a difficult plane flight with the baby that involved cleaning a very messy bathroom floor.

On Jimmy Kimmel Live! in October 2019, Caplan shared that one of her favorite things is that Riley “tends to get into the most embarrassing, humiliating situations on earth.”

She shared that they went to see a show, and Riley went to the bathroom, returning “white as a ghost, covered in sweat.” He told his wife he tried to spit his gum out into a urinal, but instead it landed on another person...in a very private place.

She joked, “I wanted him to tell the story even slower, so I could just drink it in.”

In 2023, she told People, “My whole life is different than it was 15 years ago—all vast improvements. While I appreciate that time, I’m also very happy to be in this new chapter, [where] my priorities are set.”

She continued, “I have a baby, married....That part of my life is the most important part of my life, where in the past, work was the most important part....There are definitely benefits to getting older, as well as the shock and fear that comes along with it.”