Everything You Need To Know About Conan O’Brien’s Wife & Two Kids

Conan O’Brien is having another moment. (We all saw his stint on Hot Ones, right?) The legendary comedian has always had this sort of ebb and flow element to his career, which has spanned more than three decades, where he will go a bit quiet and then suddenly be everywhere in the best of ways. It could simply be that new generations are discovering his timeless, unique sense of humor all the time. Or it could be that he knows how to enjoy a healthy work/life balance with his wife and two kids. Or it could be a nice blend of both. Either way, here’s a look at what he’s shared about marriage and fatherhood.

His wedding ring took a beating during his viral appearance on Hot Ones.

While O’Brien tends to keep his personal life fairly separate from his work, there was a pretty hilarious crossover recently when he was being interviewed on Hot Ones. In true Conan O’Brien form, he had to take things a little too far and doused himself in hot sauce to make us laugh, but it came at a cost. “When I got home, my hand was burning. I realized that the sauce got underneath my wedding ring and was burning through my skin,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper after he drank the hottest sauce and covered his face with it, going on to chastise himself, “Because it’s an acid, you idiot!” No word on what his wife had to say about this turn of events.

He met wife Liza Powel O’Brien in 1999.

The Conan O’Brien Must Go star met his future wife back in 1999, when she was working as a copywriter for the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding and O’Brien was there to film a remote segment for Late Night with Conan O’Brien. “I walk into this room of 11 people, so we’re sitting here with the creative team at FCB [Foote, Cone & Belding], and everyone here is in black, which is, I guess, a New York advertising thing,” the comedian shared on The Michelle Obama Podcast in September 2020. “I immediately start talking to her [Liza], and then I’m not even trying to be funny ... I’m just trying to find out more about this woman.”

Rather sweetly, a clip from their first meeting was shared on YouTube, and as O’Brien told Piers Morgan in 2012, “Somewhere, in the vault at NBC, there’s footage of me literally falling for my wife on camera.”

They got married in his wife’s hometown in 2002.

After dating for several years, Conan O’Brien married Liza Powel O’Brien in her hometown of Seattle in 2002. Their wedding officiant was an old Harvard friend of O’Brien’s, and famous friends like Lisa Kudrow attended the ceremony. Where, naturally, it rained.

Liza Powell O’Brien is a playwright and podcast host.

Liza Powl O’Brien is a playwright with 12 plays under her belt, according to her website, like Apostrophe, The Great Experiment, and Ruthie Goes Shopping, to name a few. She also hosts a fascinating podcast called Significant Others, which looks at the partners of famous people throughout history like Mary Todd Lincoln, Countess Sophie Tolstoy, and Kasturba Gandhi. Her own significant other has been a guest on the show.

Their daughter Neve was born in 2003.

Liza and Conan O’Brien welcomed their first child, daughter Neve, in 2003. While O’Brien certainly likes to write jokes about his kids on Twitter and once even pretended to greet his “daughter” in a 2007 taping of his talk show (it was, as ever, a comedy bit), he does not share photos or personal information about them. Neve appears to be attending Yale University as a history major, according to her LinkedIn.

She brought her dad to Coachella.

O’Brien shared that Neve invited him to join her at Coachella in 2023 during a taping of Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, and explained that she encouraged him to listen to music ahead of time on the drive. When he told her that he liked Japanese Breakfast, she told him “correct!” and he was incredibly proud of himself. “She kind of said like, ‘there’s hope for this old fool.’”

Their son Beckett was born in 2005.

The couple welcomed their youngest child, son Beckett, in 2005. Once he had his two children, he admitted during a 2014 radio interview that he didn’t “want his kids to live in a zero gravity environment,” and didn’t want them to grow up in the entertainment industry. “I don’t want them being around show business.” No worries for Beckett, who was all about tech as a younger boy and once dressed as Steve Jobs at school when asked to dress as his idol.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that somewhat theatrical? Maybe we’ll all be watching Beckett O’Brien drinking hot sauce on Hot Ones one of these days, too.