The at-home edition of “The Tonight Show” that Jimmy Fallon has hosted since going into quarantine has evolved into a real family program, with Tuesday’s episode maybe being his most personal yet.
During an “Ask the Fallons” segment, the funnyman, 45, and wife Nancy Juvonen, 52, took a walk around their neighborhood while they reminisced about how he proposed.
Fallon said he had a ring and asked Juvonen’s father for permission, while also letting her brother know he was going to pop the question.
What’s that they say about the best laid plans, though? Things went awry when, on the night Fallon planned to propose, Juvonen, a film producer, told him she secured a table at a New York City restaurant, throwing a wrench into the matter.
"I didn’t want to get engaged at the restaurant," he said. "I was going to get engaged in, like, (New York City’s) Gramercy Park or something that will just always be around, something classic. I didn't want to go to a restaurant because what if in 30 years the restaurant changes hands, now it's a laser-tag place. Now it's like, 'Kids, this is where your mom and I got engaged, at the laser-tag house.'"
The couple, who married in 2007 after becoming acquainted on the set of the 2005 movie "Fever Pitch," wound up having dinner at the restaurant and Fallon never got on bended knee. Fast forward about four months later when they were at Juvonen’s family home in New Hampshire.
They went down to a dock to have a drink while Fallon got ready for the big moment.
“I said, in my head, ‘Don’t cry, let her cry first,’” he recalled, but that also didn’t go according to plan.
“As soon as I even remotely pulled the ring out of my pocket, I started crying,” he said while laughing. “And I get down on one knee and I’m shaking. And my voice is quivering. It looks like I’m having a heart attack. Nancy’s like, ‘Are you OK, dude? Are you gonna be all right?’ And then I just said, ‘Hey, will you marry me?’ And you said yes.”
“And then the whole family started cheering from inside the house,” Nancy said.
“And somewhere my brother has this on tape, but he said he wouldn’t give it to us for, like, 20 years, so we’re 15 into that,” she added.
Fallon and Juvonen have gotten their happily ever after, now with their two daughters, Winnie, 6, and Franny, 5, who’ve frequently appeared on the at-home “Tonight Show.”