Seth Meyers is the current host of popular NBC show Late Night with Seth Meyers. He took over the show from Jimmy Fallon in 2014 after Fallon became the host of The Tonight Show. Meyers announced himself as a future star when he worked as a writer on Saturday Night Live.
By the time he left SNL, he was quite famous, but his role on Late Night gave him worldwide recognition. Meyers is hilarious, and he also provides useful political commentary on the show. Seth stand-up comedy skills were on display on the 2019 Netflix special, Seth Meyers: Lobby Baby.
Some of Meyers’ jokes focus on his loving wife Alexi Ashe and his family. Alexi doesn’t enjoy the limelight as much as her husband, but she does accompany Seth to most award shows. This piece will look at Ashe’s relationship with Seth, the couple’s children, and Ashe’s career.
Seth claims that he saw a future with Alexi the first day he met her
Meyers and Alexi met at Chris Kattan’s wedding in June 2008. Ashe was at the wedding as a guest of her sister Ariel, who worked as a designer on SNL. Meyers told Your Tango that he saw a future with Ashe immediately after he met her. The Late Night host said:
“Yes it was. I had a sense that she was the closest I’d ever met to someone who I could see myself with. Pretty much right away.”
The couple started dating after that first meeting, and in 2011, Seth hinted that a wedding was on the way. A couple of years later, Seth announced that he was engaged. Meyers told People that the proposal almost didn’t go according to plan:
“I tied [the ring] in a bow around our dog’s collar… I just had to sit there looking at the dog. I was like, ‘The dog’s going to eat the ring.”
Thankfully, the dog didn’t eat the ring, and Ashe accepted the proposal. Unfortunately, the wedding in which the couple met didn’t work out. Chris Kattan and his ex-wife Sunshine Tutt split up after just eight weeks.
Ashe opted to stick to the couples 1st September 2013 wedding date despite being sick two days before the ceremony
Seth and Ashe didn’t want to wait long to get married after getting engaged. The wedding date was set on 1st September 2013. Everything went well until disaster struck a couple of days before the wedding. Ashe was still sick on the wedding day, and a nurse advised her to push the ceremony. Luckily, the team doctor for the Chicago Bears, Adam Bennett, was one of the guests, and he offered a helping hand.
John Mulaney described the events on an article he wrote for The Fashion Bible:
“The nurse was wrong. Adam Bennett, the team doctor for the Chicago Bears, was a guest that weekend, presumably in case there were head injuries when the bride and groom danced the hora. Bennett gave Alexi NFL-style treatment, and she walked down the aisle brave and beautiful.”
The star-studded ceremony happened at Martha’s Vineyard on the appointed date. Seth is quite a busy man, but he still finds time to spend with his wife. He told Your Tango that Ashe advised him to take the Late Night job, and it turned out to be an excellent decision for the couple. He said:
“My wife is a very smart woman, smarter than me. When I decided with her counsel to take this job, we both understood it’s going to be pretty lousy six to nine months, and then it will be a lot better. Once I get in the swing of things, this is a far better job to be married than ‘SNL’ was.”
Ashe delivered the couple’s second child in their apartment lobby as she wouldn’t have made it to the hospital in time
A couple of years after getting married, Meyers announced that he and Ashe were preparing to welcome a child. Ashe Olsen Meyers was born on 27th March 2016 at Lenox Hill Hospital. Alexi and Meyers arrived at the hospital in an Uber just twenty minutes before she gave birth to Olsen. Alexi’s feminist ideals inspired the couple to name their son after her.
Meyers and Alexi’s second child arrived in more dramatic circumstances. The contractions started in the couple’s apartment, and by the time they made it to the lobby, the child was almost out. Seth explained in an episode of Late Night that Alexi decided to give birth in the couple’s apartment lobby:
“I looked at my wife, and the only way I can describe how my wife looked, was she looked like someone who was hiding a baby in a pair of sweatpants… We undressed her and the baby was just out. The head of the baby was out. I called 911 – this is how fast it happened – I called 911 and over the course of a minute conversation, I basically said, ‘We’re about to have a baby, we’re having a baby, we had a baby.”
The fire department and the police arrived just in time to cut the umbilical cord. Seth’s neighbors helped by providing towels to keep the baby warm. The couple named the child Axel Strahl, with the boy’s second name serving a tribute to Alexi’s grandparents. Her grandparents met a day after liberation from a concentration camp in Austria after the Holocaust.
Despite dealing with some of the worst human traffickers, Ashe retains a positive outlook to life
Alexi Ashe was born on 1st April 1983 to Tom and Joan Ashe in New Mexico. She enrolled in Occidental College after completing high school to study political science and government. After graduation, Ashe worked as a research assistant at the LA City Attorney’s Office up to April 2009. In 2009, she enrolled in the Southwestern University School of Law to pursue a Doctorate in International Human Rights.
In 2011, she worked as a pro bono assistant DA in King’s County, New York. Ashe worked as a criminal prosecutor in sex trafficking cases while in New York. In early 2012, she worked as a legal intern at Human Rights First, and she got to learn about people’s experiences with the US asylum process. After that, she became a legal counsel for an investment service in New York.
In 2013, she rejoined the King’s County District Attorney Office as an assistant DA. She specialized in special victims and human trafficking. She left her position in 2018 to work as an attorney for Sanctuary for Families. Ashe also co-chairs the New York State Anti-Trafficking Coalition. Her efforts against human trafficking in New York have earned her the title of ‘New Abolitionist.’
Seth told Your Tango that despite dealing with some of the worst criminals, Ashe still retains her positive outlook to life. He said:
“But you know, my wife works at the Brooklyn D.A.’s Office. She’s dealing in a far darker world than I am. And she manages to come home, and still be bright-eyed and positive. So I have to do the same.”