Key Points
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Mark-Paul Gosselaar isn’t looking to be at the center of any TV romances in the near future.
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The 52-year-old, who has been married to wife Catriona McGinn since 2012, said he has to warn her when he has intimate scenes.
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“She needs earmuffs, an eye mask and the whole thing,” he said of her reaction to watching the scenes at home.
Mark-Paul Gosselaar isn’t looking to play a romantic lead again anytime soon.
The prolific TV actor has been one half of quite a few onscreen romances in his time, but says that in recent years, he’s been avoiding them where he can. While looking back on his short-lived baseball drama, Pitch, Gosselaar acknowledged that fans of the Fox series were hoping to eventually see his and Kylie Bunbury’s characters begin a relationship.
“Whether there would be a connection between [Mike] and Ginny? That I don’t know,” he told <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/why-mark-paul-gosselaar-thinks-onscreen-romance-is-never-good/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Us Magazine. “I think they would always sort of keep that [under wraps].”
But as for whether he himself was rooting for the romance, Gosselaar replied, “No, no, no. Then I gotta go home and explain that to my wife.”
The father of four, who has been married to advertising executive Catriona McGinn since 2012, said that “it’s never a good thing” when he has romantic scenes on the horizon.
“Anytime there’s any sort of moment of intimacy, I always have to forewarn my wife that this is coming up,” theSaved By the Bell alum shared. “She needs earmuffs, an eye mask and the whole thing anytime I have to be intimate with anybody on screen.”
The former teen heartthrob married McGinn in 2012 at a Sunstone winery in Santa Ynez. The couple share two children, Dekker Edward and Lachlyn Hope, and Gosselaar also has two children from a previous marriage, Michael Charles and Ava Lorenn.
The actor has long maintained that in matters of family and career, his loved ones will always come first.
“I always say this: ‘I’m a husband first, a father second [and an] actor third,’ ” Gosselaar told Jennifer Hudson during a 2025 visit to her show. “My day revolves around making sure my wife is good [and] making sure the kids are good.”
He added, “I feel so blessed that I have a job, and I get to do what I do because I love what I do. But I just see myself as a husband and a father and that’s my day. And [my family] could care less [about] what I do.”
Gosselaar is hardly the first actor to mention a resistance to romantic scenes on screen. In the past few years, Gossip Girland You alum Penn Badgley has gotten a lot of flack for saying that herequested less intimate scenes for the latter show, explaining, “Fidelity, in every relationship, and especially my marriage, is important to me. And it just got to that point where I don’t want to do that.”
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Badgley and his wife, Domino Kirke, have since explained that the decision was not a request from her, but a personal choice that he made for himself.
Similarly, Neal McDonough has said that he had it written into his contracts that he didn’t want to kiss other women onscreen. “My wife didn’t have any problem with it,” he said during a visit to the episode of theNothing Left Unsaid podcast. “It was me, really, who had a problem.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
