Carrie Preston thought husband Michael Emerson was gay when they met

Carrie Preston is the good wife.

But before falling in love and walking down the aisle with husband Michael Emerson, in 1998, the now Emmy-winning actress had some reservations.

The couple first met while performing in “Hamlet” at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival 31 years ago.

Though immediately smitten, Preston initially thought Emerson was gay.

“I was like, ‘Who the hell’s that guy?’” the “Claws” alum recalled on Tuesday’s episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s “Dinner’s On Me” podcast.

“He walked into rehearsal with the three-piece suit, and I was like, ‘Oh, he’s gay.’ I was like, ‘He’s gay. Oh, no, OK, I have another crush on the gay guys,’ because they’re the coolest ones, and they’re always well-dressed and so polite.”

Since she assumed he wouldn’t be interested in her romantically, Preston settled on being pals.

But after Preston relayed her initial thoughts to her brother John G. Preston, who was also in “Hamlet,” the stage actor set the record straight.

“I was like, ‘Hey, you know, well what do you think about this Michael Emerson?’” she reminisced, adding that her brother was “trying to hook me up with some other guy.”

“I was like, ‘But he’s gay, right?’ And he’s like, ‘No.’ He was like, ‘He’s so not.’”

After the revelation, the “Holdovers” vet confessed she “started getting shy around” Emerson.

As it turned out, the “Lost” alum was also interested. He courted Preston, leaving flowers outside her door and inviting her to a party.

After a month of dating, the “Good Wife” star knew Emerson was the one.

“Like, a month later, I was calling my mom, ‘You need to come meet the man I’m gonna marry. I’m not gonna tell him that. But you need to come meet the man,’” Preston said.

Preston and Emerson recently celebrated 27 years of marriage.

The pair has continued to work together over the years.

Emerson currently has a role on the second season of Preston’s hit CBS show “Elsbeth.”

The actor stars as Milton Crawford, a corrupt judge who is going head to head with his wife’s titular character, Elsbeth Tascioni.

“It is fun,” Emerson gushed to Deadline in November about working with Preston. “I have to say that it’s a little more after work because part of me is having to set aside the fact that I know Carrie and that I actually got out of bed that very morning with her. So I have to erase that, and that takes some mental power. I have to pretend that she’s someone I don’t know, but in fact, it’s a character named Elsbeth Tascioni.”

Preston echoed her husband’s sentiments, telling the outlet, “The fun thing about working with Michael is that, we’ve been together for 30 years. We’ve been married 26, so we have this ease with each other. We didn’t even talk about the scenes at home, and we didn’t work on them together. We did the minimum, we just ran the lines for words in the van on the way to work to make sure we knew the lines. And then we just showed up and were able to put each other’s performances in the other’s hands.”

Preston revealed she welcomes comparisons to “Columbo,” the 1968 mystery series starring Peter Falk as the rumpled, trenchcoat-wearing Lt. Columbo.

The series helped inspire “Elsbeth” creators Robert and Michelle King to transplant Elsbeth from Chicago to New York City.

“Robert and Michelle King told me that during the pandemic that they started watching ‘Columbo’ reruns and just loved them and found it comforting,” Preston told The Post. “They thought, ‘Hey, that could be how we could create a new show for Elsbeth Tascioni. Put her in a Columbo role and make this a police show and not a law show.’”

“I would say she’s tenacious, she’s unconventional, and I like to think of her as extremely present,” the CBS star gushed about Elsbeth. “She takes in everything around her with equal attention, so she never knows what detail is going to be the one that unlocks the mystery … she somehow has the capacity to focus on a lot of things all at once — and has a brain that can hold it all.”