Nick is 11 and a half years younger than I am, so his mom is only, like, 11 or 12 years older than me. I didn't call her Mrs. Offerman because that would be weird because we're, like, the same age, so I think I went straight to Cathy, but there's a mom element, and his parents are so great.
We met in April of 2000, and we weren't really an official couple until June or July. His family has a fishing trip they go on every year in Minnesota, so he had invited me to go and meet his whole family. There was, like, no cell phone service at the time; people were using those giant cordless phones that looked like a brick.
Madonna was very cool. I thought she was really nice, really present, and she worked really, really hard... She didn't necessarily know our real names in real-life, because why should she? Who cares? Some of the cast were really offended, like, 'She doesn't even know my name!' I'm like, 'Who cares? Madonna's doing our show. It doesn't matter.'
I never had a burning desire to have children. But then I met Nick, and I thought, 'This is the only person I'd do this with.' So we tried, but I was a little long in the tooth for that sort of thing. But we didn't turn it into a soap opera. We tried for about a year or so, and it didn't happen and took that to mean it wasn't meant to be.
I think of myself as a character actress, and Karen's just one of the characters I've gotten to play, but I feel like Karen takes on so much more weight because the show was on for eight seasons, and it was such a popular show. But you have to move on to telling another story in a different world.