The Surprising Way Lea Thompson Met Her Husband

In Hollywood, meeting your significant other through work is a pretty common scenario. Actress Lea Thompson's love story, however, has a bit of a twist. She came very close to not working with her future husband, director Howard Deutch, on the 1987 film Some Kind of Wonderful. As Deutch explained in a bonus feature included in a Blu-ray set of John Hughes films, which includes Some Kind of Wonderful, Thompson initially turned down working on the film.

It took a box office bomb for Thompson to join the project. Deutch revealed that she finally accepted his offer to act in Some Kind of Wonderful because of another Howard — 1986's Howard the Duck. He explained that she decided to star in the romance following the lackluster reception of Howard the Duck, which was panned by critics and only holds a 13 percent Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes.

"We met that way and we eventually married," said Deutch in the feature (via People). "But that's another story."

Thompson has spoken about the flop before. "It was painful," she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016. "I had to get on another movie. I wouldn't have done [Some Kind of Wonderful] if Howard wasn't such a bomb."

While the abysmal premiere of Howard the Duck seemed catastrophic at the time, things worked out for the best. Aside from meeting her husband, Thompson also starred in a movie that would go on to become a classic. "Things that seemed bad had turned out to be good in the end," she said.

Deutch agreed with this assessment in the feature, explaining that Thompson helped make Some Kind of Wonderful a hit. "She had a lot to do, as far as I'm concerned, with the tone changing of that movie as well as some of the other casting," he said. "It was one of the best decisions I've ever made."