College sweethearts turned creative partners? And being okay with your wife
sleeping with another man?! Yikes! This is the shocking truth about Melissa Rauch's husband.
Melissa Rauch and Winston Beigel met while they were both attending Marymount Manhattan College
on the Upper East Side of New York City, during their first year. They quickly bonded over their
shared passion for comedy, and after he saw one of her stand-up routines, they decided to team up
and write sketches together. As Rauch explained during a 2016 interview with RogerEbert.com,
"We have a very similar sensibility and our favorite thing to do is make each other laugh."
After working together, Rauch and Biegel then became involved romantically.
As she put it during a 2014 interview with New Jersey Monthly,
"I am very fortunate that I met my husband in college. He is my best friend and the love of
my life, in addition to being an incredible writing partner. The only thing I regret is
not meeting him even sooner, as my life has just gotten better since he came into it."
Rauch and Beigel ended up exchanging vows in 2007,
and he actually decided to take her surname, as he now goes by "Winston Rauch."
Rauch and Beigel's first major professional professional collaboration happened in 2005
in the form of a comedic one-woman stage show called The Miss Education of Jenna Bush.
They presented it that year at the New York International Fringe Festival,
where it won the Overall Excellence Award for Outstanding Solo Show. With Rauch starring,
Beigel directed the critically acclaimed project about the rebellious daughter
of the 43rd American president. In an interview about the show, Rauch explained,
"Like a lot of people from our generation,
Jenna's had opportunities and privileges handed to her, which can be as much a
burden as a blessing. We think we pretty fairly exhibit that burden in the script."
In 2006, Rauch and Beigel staged The Miss Education of Jenna Bush at other venues,
first at the 12th Annual Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado,
and then at the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles. Rauch talked about the
dynamics of the couple's working relationship with Interview Magazine, as she revealed,
"Our process is that we outline everything to death before we take a stab at writing
the dialogue [...] Sometimes I'll take a stab at the scene, he'll take a stab at the scene,
and we'll combine the best of. Or it will be like, 'What you wrote is better.' It's pretty balanced."
Winston Beigel may not be a household name, but he has quite a few projects under his belt,
including the dark comedy The Bronze, which he and his wife wrote together.
The 2016 movie is about a former Olympic gymnast attempting to mount a comeback,
only to discover that a younger athlete may be getting in her way.
Rauch was especially excited when the project became a reality.
As she gushed to reporters during a screening of the film,
"I was just so thrilled because when we wrote it on the page,
we kept thinking, are we actually going to be able to do this? So we were shooting,
and I was running back behind the camera saying, 'This is so exciting being able to do this!'"
The Bronze is a little raunchy, and it includes an acrobatic sex scene between Rauch and her co-star
Sebastian Stan. Fortunately her husband was a good sport about that. As she recalled to Vulture,
"Winston was so game throughout. Anything for the sake of the movie!
He would even be like, 'I think we should do another take of that.'"
"Everybody's going to be asking about the sex scene in the movie."
"Is there a sex scene?"
"There is an amazing sex scene!"
Rauch and Beigel are the proud parents of two kids. In December 2017, they welcomed their
daughter Sadie, and in 2020, Sadie was joined by her little brother Brooks. But before either of
them arrived, the couple endured a heartbreaking setback in the form of a miscarriage.
When Rauch was pregnant with Sadie, she wrote a guest column for Glamour in which she admitted,
"[I'm] pretty much terrified at the moment that [a miscarriage] will happen again."
Nevertheless, she wanted to share her story in
the hopes that it would help other women going through the same thing.
She also revealed that she wasn't going to blame herself for the miscarriage. As she put it,
"For a while, my husband and I just started saying to each other — without
any judgment or acrimony to the baby, of course—that the baby 'bailed' instead."
Rauch also admitted that she wondered why other women were able to carry their
baby to term but she wasn't. She concluded the essay by declaring,
"So, to all the women out there who are dealing with fertility issues, have gone
through a miscarriage, or are going through the pain of it currently, allow me to leave
you with this message: You are not alone. And it is perfectly okay to not be okay right now."
When a married woman goes into labor, you'd expect her spouse to be in the delivery room
alongside her. But unfortunately for Melissa Rauch and Winston Beigel, he couldn't be there
for her because of COVID-19 restrictions. As Rauch explained in her 2020 Glamour essay,
"Although the hospital I was delivering at did allow birth partners,
my husband had to stay home with our daughter since our original plan of having family come
to town — as well as our backup plans — were no longer options due to COVID-19."
Rauch also talked about saying her goodbyes to her
family as she walked into the hospital alone. As she joked,
"I tried my best to hold on to that as I said
goodbyes to my husband and daughter and walked myself into the hospital,
masked up, clumsily balancing my bags and birthing ball like I was doing a knocked-up Mr. Bean bit."
Rauch also admitted that there were times she wished she had
the comfort of her husband while she was in the hospital. As she put it,
"I don't want to sugarcoat it; it's an inherently difficult situation and there were moments I felt
every feeling in the book of feelings — so much so that my feelings were having major feelings."
Fortunately, her nurses and doctors made her feel secure while in the delivery room,
and her husband was able to be there remotely via FaceTime.
Melissa Rauch and Winston Beigel have a production company called After January,
which is based at Warner Bros. Television. She approached the studio to pitch a
reboot for the NBC sitcom Night Court, which originally aired from 1984 to 1992. And now,
they're both set to serve as executive producers for the new show. What's more,
Rauch will be starring on the series. As she said in a statement when the pilot was picked up,
"My intention was purely to be behind the camera on this project,
but my plans quickly changed after falling in love with the incredible script from the
brilliant mind of Dan Rubin. I couldn't be more thrilled to join forces with Dan,
the immense talent that is John Larroquette, and the two powerhouse institutions of
comedy that are NBC and Warner Bros. to bring Night Court back to television."
"Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."
Rauch will play Abby Stone, daughter of Judge Harry Stone, played by the late Harry Anderson
on the original show. Like her father, Abby will be presiding over the graveyard shift of one of
Manhattan's arraignment courts, as she tries to bring order to all the craziness happening
in her courtroom. The show is set to premiere sometime during the 2022 to 2023 TV season.
On September 9, 2021, Melissa Rauch and Winston Beigel launched a charity
that started with a Big Bang Theory fan from Ireland. In 2017, Oscar Keogh was diagnosed
with a Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma tumor when he was just three years old.
His parents Yavanna and Lar were told that Oscar had stage four cancer. While treatment could
help him live at least another two years, that was all that could be done for them.
Not long after the diagnosis, the couple reached out to Rauch, who played Oscar's favorite Big Bang
character, Bernadette. Yavanna was hoping that she could get her son an autograph from the actress,
and it was at this point that Rauch and her husband connected with the Keoghs.
After Oscar passed away at the age of five, Rauch and Beigel decided that
they wanted to do something to honor his life. So that's when the charity,
Oscar's Kids, was born. As she shared in an interview with Leaders Magazine,
"My husband, Winston, and I joined forces with Oscar’s parents,
our dear friends, Yavanna and Lar, to form Oscar’s Kids."
"There's certain people who come into your life
and impact you so deeply they change your heart forever."
The trans-Atlantic organization raises awareness and funding for pediatric cancer.
The Keoghs run the chapter based out of Ireland,
while Rauch and Beigel run the American division. With a background in marketing,
Beigel is in charge of handling the acquiring of funds for the cancer research.
We're absolutely sure that Melissa Rauch and Winston Beigel were glued to their TV sets
during both the recent Winter and Summer Olympics, as their sports fandom has been well-publicized.
During the promotion of their film The Bronze, Rauch shared with Hypable that
while she personally has no gymnastics skills, she is an admirer of the sport
and she and her husband enjoy watching it during the Olympics. As she put it,
"When we watched the Games together and were looking for ideas for the original concept
of the movie, we always found it funny when the announcers said something like,
'Oh, and they'll have to settle for the bronze.'"
This is what actually gave Rauch and Beigel the idea to have their main character
rest on her laurels of being an Olympic bronze medalist. And the couple don't only
watch gymnastics during the Olympics. Their fandom runs so deep that they even had season
tickets for the college gymnastics team at UCLA. As Rauch revealed to RogerEbert.com,
"We would go every weekend to watch these meets and sort of
stalk the athletes. They were just incredible."