Chrissy Teigen Says John Legend Was Known for Either ‘Being in the Closet or a Modelizer’ Before They Dated

Chrissy Teigen and John Legend
Mark Seliger/Vanity Fair

The couple opens up in a new family shoot and interview with 'Vanity Fair.'

These days John Legend and Chrissy Teigen are couple goals, frequently publicly declaring their affection and sharing pics of their adorable children, 3-year-old Luna and 1-year-old Miles. In the new cover story for Vanity Fair, the couple opens up about their love story and the perceptions of Legend before he got together with his model wife. 

“He was kind of known at the time for either being in the closet or a modelizer,” Teigen tells the magazine of her now-husband. “I used to go on the websites and it was always either how I was his beard, or how he paid his past serious girlfriends, or how he was with some new model. Oh my god, I would read everything.

Teigen starred in Legend's 2007 music video for his song, "Stereo," and the pair hooked up shortly after. 

“It got serious pretty quickly,” Legend, 40, recalls. “She just entertained the hell out of me, texting me. What people respond to in her tweets today was the same energy in those texts. I didn’t know that I wanted someone funny until I was actually with someone funny.”

Mark Seliger/Vanity Fair

At the time, Teigen was very broke and partied "super-hard" with her model roommates. "I had no credit cards, I didn’t have a bank account, and it just didn’t occur to me to ask my dad for money,” she says. “I knew exactly how much it was with tax to get a McDouble and fries.” 

These days the couple is doing just fine, and Teigen even recently turning down the opportunity to have her own talk show. 

Mark Seliger/Vanity Fair

“It was just too much attention and focus on me,” the 33-year-old model reveals why she passed on the opportunity. “It’s almost like the more things you do, the closer you are to getting canceled. It’s so scary to me -- to have the world turn on you and hate you.”

Teigen is very aware of being overexposed in the spotlight. “There are some famous couples I look at and I’m like, ‘Ugh, we get it. Stop trying so hard, you’re so lame,'" she says. "I think people definitely think that about us but…that’s because I think of everything," she admits. 

Mark Seliger/Vanity Fair

That self consciousness also applies to how she chooses to parent her and Legend's two kids and share their lives on social media. 

“I know a lot of people who make the conscious decision to blur out their kids’ faces,” the cookbook author says of her famous friends who are parents. “I worry, 'What must they think of me?' They must think I’m insane.”

She adds that though she does spend a lot of time with her kiddos, she certainly doesn't do it on her own. 

“I hate pretending that we do it on our own,” Teigen tells Vanity Fair. “We have daytime help, nighttime, weekend. I don’t know how my mom did it.”

As if these two could be any cuter, Teigen revealed on social media that Legend made a grand gesture over the weekend on her behalf.

"I do not normally brag about John, as it is my schtick to make fun of him always, but he flew from London to L.A. instead of London to D.C. to have dinner with me and watch Love Island UK because I haven’t been feeling like myself lately," she tweeted of her husband. "Just a few hours but it meant a lot. Thank u."

Here's more with the happy couple:

 

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