Noah Wyle needed some convincing when it came to accepting the Sexiest Man Alive title. Lucky for us, his wife, Sara, pushed him over the edge.
“I thought that sounded like a prank,” the Pitt star, 55, tells PEOPLE in his 2026 Sexiest Man Alive cover story. “Just not in a million years did I think that this would be an honor bestowed on me.”
But Sara?
“She’s the reason I accepted because she was very pleased that this reflects well on her taste,” he says. “She thinks I’m a good guy and that the kind of person that I am and the kind of father I am, the kind of husband I am is worth promoting. I thought, ‘Okay, if you say so.’ ”
Noah and Sara met in 2010, married in June 2014 and welcomed daughter Frances, now 11, a year later. The ER alum also shares son Owen, 24, and daughter Auden, 21, with ex Tracy Warbin.
While Sara was “totally amused” by his Sexiest Man Alive status, his older kids’ reaction was “markedly profound,” says Noah. “My son is super practical. He was like, ‘Oh, this is going to make my life so much harder now. But that’s cool, Dad. But also, you invite a lot of haters too.’ My older daughter was just like, ‘No way, no way.’ Because I think she’s going to tease me about this for the next 50 years,” he laughs.
The Emmy-winning actor isn’t just the Sexiest Man Alive — he might also be the most romantic. He recalls one of the early ways he shared his love for Sara:
“When my wife and I were first courting, I had two kids from a previous marriage, and we weren’t always able to be together because I’d have them, and for almost a year I didn’t introduce everybody. So when we weren’t together, I would make these gifts for my wife,” he says.
“I’d make a book with photographs and mementos of things that we’d done on dates and drawings and poems and things that I’d find. Just ways of being able to do something for her when we were apart that I thought she’d like when we saw each other again.”
These days their perfect date night is simple and “usually it involves eating.”
“We tend to eat very quickly when we’re in a restaurant, we can get through a dinner in, like 42 minutes,” he says.
“We’re not big on the kind of coursing it out. We’d rather get to the activity portion, something fun, go to a movie, just being together and just laughing.
‘‘That stuff’s hard to squeeze in when you’ve got a full life. So we tend it, you know, it doesn’t take much for it to feel special, which is nice.” – People
