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Actor Jacob Anderson broke out with his role as warrior Grey Worm on Game of Thrones. He’s gone on to star in the critically acclaimed AMC adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire as the protagonist Louis de Pointe. In addition to his career as an actor, Anderson makes music under the stage name Raleigh Ritchie. He’s also a family man, married to his partner of over a decade, actress Aisling Loftus. They share one child.
While Anderson talks a lot about his creative process and roles in public, he’s not very revealing about his relationship. But he has dropped a few hints about their life together here and there. Here’s everything to know about Loftus and her marriage to the HBO star.
Who is Aisling Loftus?
Like Anderson, Loftus is English, but her parents, Paddy and Eileen, hail from Ireland, and she has an older sister named Aoife.
“My dad Paddy is from Dublin, and my mum Eileen is from Tipperary,” she told the Daily Mail in December 2015. “Although I was born and raised in Nottinghamshire, the Irish side of our family was always kept very much alive…we’d visit Ireland every summer holiday, and it would still be referred to as ‘going home’. And that’s exactly how it felt to us.”
She’s been interested in acting since she was a child, taking classes at the Carlton Workshops, before going on to study at the Becket School in Nottingham, according to the Nottingham Post. When she was only 10 years old, she appeared in an episode of Peak Practice. She played Agnes Towler in Mr Selfridge, and starred in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as Charlotte Lucas. She also played Sonya Rostova in Andrew Davies’ BBC adaptation of War and Peace.
Loftus told the Daily Mail that when she landed the part in War and Peace, she discussed it with Anderson.
“To be honest, I’m often the last one to realize how well things are going,” she said. “I’ll say to my boyfriend, ‘Oh, I’ve just been offered this little role.’ And he’ll say, ‘You’ve just been offered what? Wow! That is amazing!’ He’s a brilliant antidote to my tendency to talk myself down.”
She also talked a bit about how they manage jealousy around love scenes: They basically don’t have any.
“If they serve the story then it’s okay,” Loftus admitted. “But if I’m kissing someone who’s not my boyfriend, I do tend to feel quite detached. It helps that Jacob’s an actor too, so he gets it. I never feel the need to go home and say, ‘Guess who I’ve been kissing today.’ It doesn’t bleed into our life together.”
She also shared, “I’d probably always choose a Brit for a boyfriend—despite having been romantically involved with a Frenchman and now a Russian character on-screen. I suppose I just love British humor, our way of whingeing about things and being so self-deprecating, our preoccupation with manners. Jacob’s very British in all those ways. But he is also, of course, just very much himself.”
In 2019, she acted in a stage show at the National Theater called Small Island, which Anderson gushed about in an Instagram post.
“You know when you experience something so beautiful, so heartwarming, heartwrenching and moving and the whole thing just sweeps you away with it?” he wrote in the caption. “Well Small Island is that. It’s all of that, and more. The epic staging, the flawless performances, the music, the heart. Everything. And it hit me in a personal way that’s hard to explain. It’s my grandparents’ story. So by extension it’s part of my story. It got me like that. My wife also happens to be in Small Island, and she fucking GLOWS. Not because she’s my wife, but because she’s THAT GOOD. She’s on fire. I’m bursting with pride, but I’m also just a big big fan. I implore you, as a punter, to go and see Small Island.”
How long have Loftus and Anderson been together?
The couple were married at the end of 2018 according to Document Journal, and have been together since around 2011. They now live together in London.
In 2016, he told Wonderland Magazine about his single “Never Better.” He’d written it four years earlier, saying, “I wasn’t going to do therapy. It wasn’t working for me. It was at that point where I met my girlfriend, and suddenly, I could trust somebody with stuff I hadn’t told anybody before.”
He also shared a story with the Guardian about their first time meeting. He said, “I’ll never forget first setting eyes on my girlfriend, the actress Aisling Loftus, because it all seemed to happen in slow motion. We’ve been together five years. She’s intelligent, sensitive and empathetic, and I’ve never met anybody who cares about people as much as she does. We never run out of things to talk about, and our relationship has always felt very natural.”
In 2017, he seemingly celebrated their anniversary on Instagram, sharing a picture of them dancing together and writing in the caption, “6 Years of sunshine.”
Do they have any children?
The couple share one child, who he told Clash Magazine was a girl in 2020. He said, “Well, me and my wife have just had a baby—so we’re somewhat exhausted all the time. Whenever she nods off, we try and run for a nap!”
At the time, he was promoting his new album Andy, and added, “It’s really confusing talking about the album whilst trying to raise a newborn, also we finished the album so long ago now, that it’s hard to even remember it when I’ve got this going on.”
In July 2020, he shared a picture of himself with the baby in a carrier on his chest, writing, “I feel like myself for the first time. Also sleep deprivation. ♥️ (p.s. My mask is in my pocket and there was nobody around. Be safe out there.) (P.p.s I really had to fight making the caption ‘My daughter look just like Sia, you can’t see her’).”
Before parenthood, Anderson told the Guardian, “The idea of being a parent is scary, but Ash will be a wonderful mum. Ash and I often talk about the kind of parents we’d like to be. It’s an exciting prospect, another journey for us.”
And he told HungerTV in October 2022, “I’ve got a little girl now, and she’s amazing. She kept us going and kept us busy, and it’s been an honor to watch her growing up.”
Loftus has talked a bit about becoming a mom and how that has changed her career in an interview with Premiere Scene.
“I think when people have been working for a while, they can get quite blasé about it all, and it’s such a shame because you don’t know when it’s going to be gone,” she said. “My husband had a job in New Orleans, and because we’ve got the baby, I was over there with him as we wanted to stay together, but it meant that I wasn’t acting that whole time, and I really missed it.”
She added, “It made me think that the next job that I have, I’m really going to relish it, and I think when you relish the job, you do your best work, and people enjoy working with you, and that can lead to more work.”
What else has he said about his wife?
He mentioned in an April 2019 interview with Complex that he enjoys Marvel films and went to see Infinity War by himself in Belfast while on a shoot.
“I’m quite happy to go to the cinema by myself,” he explained. “I went to see Us and just sat there like a creep. My wife is not going to come to see Avengers with me at midnight. She’s just not, and that’s cool.”
In a February 2016 interview with the Daily Mail, he was asked what the secret to a happy relationship is. He replied, “Communication, openness, and never running out of things to say to each other.”
The outlet asked what the most romantic thing he’s ever done was. Anderson answered, “I leave little notes around the house for my girlfriend because I love her and like to remind her now and then.”
And he sometimes shares sweet pictures of them together on Instagram.
Like this one of “Mrs. Anderson,” apparently taken on their wedding day.