Actress Uzo Aduba Cracks up While Recalling First Kiss With ‘Grace and Frankie’ Star

Uzo Aduba took a trip down memory lane, reminiscing about her first kiss — and it was with a surprising but familiar face. The actress appeared on Wednesday’s episode of the Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast with Kelly Ripa, where she reflected on the intimate moment.

It happened at the end of the episode during a rapid-fire question game where Ripa asked Aduba to recall the first time she locked lips with someone. The Orange Is the New Black star immediately busted out laughing while remembering the day. “I’m only laughing because Baron, my friend Baron Vaughn, was on Frankie and Grace [sic],” she eventually blurted out.

Ripa acted shocked by the reveal as Aduba, 43, giggled about the encounter. “Not on the show. He was my classmate in real life,” the Painkiller star explained about the Grace and Frankie actor.

She then shared her hesitancy to be candid about such a personal topic but noted that she and Vaughn have remained friends.

Sweet Love Story

Nowadays, Aduba is happily married to filmmaker Robert Sweeting, with whom she exchanged vows in a secret ceremony in New York in 2020. In June 2023, the Netflix star announced she was expecting her first child with Sweeting, born later that November.

This past September, Aduba talked about what it was like dating in her 30s and how happy she is now that she found her forever partner.

“You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your one,” Aduba said in an interview with People. “What was sometimes challenging is remembering some of these relationships that were just like, he wasn’t great and I really thought this guy was the moon. He was the furthest thing from it.”

Aduba ended up finding her “moon” in Sweeting, though the Emmy Award winner admitted she nearly gave up on finding her person before her husband came along. “I was so sure that it just wasn’t going to happen because it was hard out there on these streets,” she told People. “I had just accepted that that was my story, that I had waited too long or didn’t give it enough attention because I was career-focused or all these other me-me things.”

However, after meeting Sweeting at a rooftop bar in New York, the rest was history. “He made me feel safe,” Aduba revealed. “I felt safe to be all of myself around him — not the best of myself, all of myself, my frailties, my vulnerabilities, my weak, ugly parts. I felt safe enough to show him that. And when he saw it, he still loved me. I never, and still never, doubted that he loved me.”

As for Vaughn, he’s also appeared to move on from his kiss with Aduba and is believed to be in a relationship with playwright Rhiannon Ciara Vaughn, the mother of his young son.