​

The Gist

• Grace Van Patten and Tell Me Lies co-star Jackson White have been dating since they met at their audition for the show in 2022.

• White is the son of actress Katey Sagal. He studied music at USC before becoming an actor.

• The couple are “wildly different” than their toxic characters in the hit Hulu series, Van Patten says.

Tell Me Lies co-stars Grace Van Patten and Jackson White found love off-screen.

The couple have been publicly linked since Season 1 of the twisty Hulu series, all but confirming their relationship in November 2022 when they stepped out together for the CFDA Awards. In 2024, they left no doubt about their connection as Van Patten told People they were “together in real life”.

She and White just wrapped filming on Season 3 of the binge-worthy drama. Speaking to Glamour in October 2025, the actress hinted at what fans can expect. “Season 3 really dives into the other characters, other than Steven and Lucy,” she said. “You really start to see everyone’s web get more and more tangled until we’re all one messy, entangled web, which I think will be really interesting. I would say it’s not just Lucy and Steven making bad decisions this season,” she added.

Their characters might be toxic, but in real life, Van Patten and White are “wildly different, thank goodness,” she told People in September 2024. In fact, acting opposite her boyfriend has allowed the actress to fully embrace her part as the conflicted Lucy. “It makes me feel so safe and so comfortable and able to go there and be vulnerable, because I’m so comfortable with him,” she shared elsewhere in the same interview. “And that part of it was so beautiful.”

In August 2025, White supported his girlfriend at the premiere of her Hulu series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox. The couple looked as in-love as ever in photos from the night, including one with Van Patten’s sisters, June and Anna, and mom Wendy Rossmeyer Van Patten.

Here’s everything to know about Grace Van Patten’s boyfriend, actor Jackson White, and their real-life romance.

He’s the son of an actress and a late musician.

Performing is in White’s DNA. He likely inherited the acting bug from mom Katey Sagal of Married… with Children fame—although she didn’t want him to follow in her footsteps right away.

“[Sagal] said, ‘You’re not doing anything until you’re 18. So you’ve got to finish high school. You’ve got to, like, try to do the college thing, and then you can see [if] you want to be a crazy person and do the acting thing,’” White recalled to Van Patten in a joint interview for Entertainment Tonight.

The Golden Globe-winning actress shared White and his older sister Sarah with ex-husband Jack White, a drummer and actor. Jack died in July 2024, People reported. “This guy taught me everything,” Jackson wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post announcing his father’s passing. “We had ups and downs, as a man has with their father. But in the end it was just love.”

He studied music at USC before switching to acting.

Originally, White thought his sister Sarah White would be the actress of the family like their mother, while he would become a musician like their father. He told Esquire in September 2022 that he “ended up going to this pretty small music program at USC [the University of Southern California],” but struggled to focus on his coursework.

“So I did what I did in high school when I got distracted, which is I would do a play, because then I could skip class and go to play rehearsal,” he recalled. “I started auditioning for musicals and then at a certain point I was like, all right, I’m going to switch over and just do this. So I dropped out of school and did two years of really intense Meisner study.”

That decision paid off: besides his breakout role as the sexy-yet-sinister Stephen DeMarco in Tell Me Lies, the actor has also nabbed parts in 2023 Stephen King horror flick Pet Sematary: Bloodlines and buzzy Hulu biopic Swiped, about the founder of dating app Bumble.

He and Van Patten started dating after their first in-person audition.

White and future co-star Van Patten began dating after sparks flew during the audition process—kind of. “I didn’t like Jackson,” the Tell Me Lies star said in an October 2025 appearance on Call Her Daddy about their first Zoom chemistry read. But when they met in person for another audition, he had “a completely different energy” which drew her to him.

“We didn’t know what was going to be more complicated—if he did get the part or if he didn’t—but we didn’t care,” Van Patten told Elle of their decision to start a relationship, adding, “We just couldn’t help it.”

After finding out White would play her on-screen love interest, she tried to keep their romance low-key. “We weren’t like, ‘We need to keep this secret!’ But we were like, we don’t have to flaunt it,” Van Patten said on Call Her Daddy. Later in the interview, she explained, “[W]e also saw it as a fun game. Like, how long can we go without people realizing?”

The charade didn’t last long, as their chemistry was too palpable to fool their fellow cast members once filming started. “The cast knew pretty immediately, because we would all hang out to get to know each other…so they knew right away and then people just caught on,” the actress recalled.

White was coy about their relationship status around the time Tell Me Lies premiered, but he dropped the occasional hint of their real-life romance. In a 2022 appearance on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, he told host Amanda Hirsch, “I have such a crush on [Van Patten]…our lives are built in together. We have so much to do together.”

They’ve drawn on real emotions while filming Tell Me Lies.

A unique advantage of playing love interests while being IRL partners is that the couple has been able to draw on actual emotions when filming scenes—and not just the steamy ones. In her Call Her Daddy appearance, Van Patten reflected on how director Robin Wright got her to channel her feelings for White into her performance for a fight scene.

“She’s like, ‘Just think, what if Jackson did do this? What if he walked out and said on the way out, ‘I never loved you. I don’t even think you’re pretty.’’ And I was like—in the moment, I was like, Oh God, that’d be really awful. Really bad. And I just tried to go there.”

White also described the benefit of having those intense fictional exchanges with his off-screen girlfriend in a 2024 interview with Decider. “We have that safety with each other, which is really fun. So whenever we do get to do something—[with] a lot of freedom, it’s really cool.”

In the same interview, he said, “It’s the best working with Grace. She is amazing. She’s so grounded, and generous, and just soulful and f—ing—yeah she’s great,”

Their red-carpet couple style needs to be studied.

While they’re only a few years into their relationship, White and Van Patten have already shared several memorable couple-style moments on the red carpet. At the 2022 CFDA Fashion Awards, they served up a study in contrasts—Van Patten in a green hooded Tom Ford set and White in a gray suit and aviators, also by Tom Ford.

Van Patten later delivered a bewitching take on the no-pants trend at the 2023 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. The actress stunned in a sheer leather and lace black dress by Olivier Theyskens, per W. White was, of course, by her side in a sharp black suit.

Their most matchy-matchy looks to date came at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where White’s film Swiped had its premiere. The couple took to the red carpet in all-black ensembles, although Van Patten added a pop of color with a chic red purse.

Read the original article on InStyle