Heavy/Getty Hallmark actress Torrey DeVitto has found love in in a small town
Over the past year, life has taken a huge turn for actress Torrey DeVitto, who says it feels like she’s living inside one of her many Hallmark Channel movies.
Appearing on the “Broad Ideas” podcast with Rachel Bilson and Olivia Allen, DeVitto, 40, discussed on the show — released on July 15, 2024 — how she went from living it up in Hollywood to settling down on a Michigan farm, where she’s now engaged and expecting her first baby.
Torrey DeVitto’s Love Story Mirrors Common Hallmark Movie Trope
In September, a rep for DeVitto confirmed to People that her boyfriend, Jared LaPine, had proposed. According to Us Weekly, the couple had been dating for six months. DeVitto revealed in March that she and LaPine met weeks after her breakup with Chicago Cubs manager David Ross.
Just like the popular Hallmark movie trope in which a “big city girl” returns to her family home and falls in love with a handsome, rugged “small town boy,” DeVitto revealed on the podcast that the exact thing happened to her.
While spending lots of time in Chicago when she starred on NBC’s “Chicago Med,” DeVitto explained, she frequently visited her mom, who lives in Michigan near other family members.
“She lives in this really cute town that’s, like, right on the water,” DeVitto told Bilson and Allen, “and, you just walk through and it’s literally like a Hallmark town. You’re like, ‘Is this real?’ And it’s so artsy and just I loved the community, and it’s a two-hour-flat drive from Chicago.”
“So, I was like, ‘This is amazing. Like, why don’t I live here?'” DeVitto continued. “So during the pandemic, I was like, ‘Oh, great. I’ll get like a zombie apocalypse property where all my friends can live and everything goes to (expletive).”
DeVitto, whose most recent Hallmark movie was 2023’s “Love’s Greek to Me,” explained that she never expected to live there full-time, but as the pandemic dragged on and she left “Chicago Med,” she realized it was the perfect time to “change things up.” So, she decided to sell her Los Angeles home and “just sit at the farm and see what happens.”
“And now you are engaged,” Allen said, and then joked, “Did he just, like, come and milk the cow?”
Laughing, DeVitto then revealed that even her meet-cute with LaPine was also straight out of a Hallmark movie.
“My mom’s side of the family lives in Michigan, so I used to spend summers there, so I had a connection in Michigan,” she explained, adding that a cousin she’s “really close” with decided to coordinate a meet-up between her and a guy she went to college with who was “cute” and “liked to read.”
Though DeVitto was skeptical, she told Bilson and Allen, she was smitten as soon as she saw LaPine.
“You know, he like had, like, the old re-done Jeep and the fox-red lab and, like, the flannel shirts and I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ And he did like to read!”
“It’s getting more and more Hallmark by the minute,” Allen exclaimed, to which she replied, “Totally.”
Torrey DeVitto Says She’s Expecting a Baby Girl on November 24
After spending time with LaPine, DeVitto said on the “Broad Appeal” podcast, she was relieved to find they shared the same world views despite their very different backgrounds.
Though her mom lives in Michigan now, DeVitto grew up “surrounded by the entertainment industry,” per IMDb, and often on the road since her dad played drums for legendary “Piano Man” Billy Joel.
DeVitto told Bilson and Allen, “Luckily, he and I shared the same views, because you know, we’re in a smaller town in Michigan, he has the dog, he wears the flannel, so, ‘Let’s get down to talking,'” DeVitto said. “We were the same, so I was like, ‘Okay, cool.’ We love the same things, we have the same morals, so I was like, “Great!”
Though DeVitto, hasn’t revealed when she and LaPine plan to marry, they announced via Instagram in mid-May that they’re expecting a baby girl in November. On the “Broad Appeal” podcast, she specified that her due date is November 24.
DeVitto was married once before, to actor Paul Wesley, but they finalized their divorce in 2013 after less than two years of marriage, per Us Weekly.
In May, she said on the “Pretty Little Liars: True Crime” podcast, “It was really for the best. He’s lovely — we shouldn’t have gotten married. We were really young when we met. We were 22 and we were crazy. Two insane people getting married. We were young and wild.”