Kumail Nanjiani would ultimately like to remove himself from this narrative, but not before having a little fun with it first.
"There was a rumor going around last year that I was having an affair with Michelle Obama," the comedian, who's been married to Emily Gordon since 2007, said on the Dec. 25 episode of So True With Caleb Hearon. "I know, I was so excited."
In fact, he had no idea that he had been linked to the former first lady until recently, when a mutual friend pulled Emily aside and said, "'Hey, so, I heard that Kumail and Michelle Obama are, like, doing it.' And she wasn't even upset."
So, suffice it to say, Kumail and his wife aren't big sick over the story, the Fallout actor clarifying, "I've never met Michelle Obama."
But, as Caleb Hearon then pointed out, the made-up tale comes on the heels of the rumor that former President Barack Obama was romantically involved with Jennifer Aniston.
You know, the one that the Friends alum also had a big laugh over.
"Of all the calls you get from your publicist where you’re like, ‘Oh no, what’s it gonna be?’" Jen, who just spent her first Christmas with boyfriend Jim Curtis, said on Jimmy Kimmel Live in October. "Or the emails saying some cheesy tabloid’s going to make up a story, and then it’s that."
She quipped, "I was not mad at it.”
But, for the record, Jen added, "I know Michelle more than him.”
Kumail, meanwhile, was ready to dig into that new-to-him tidbit about The Morning Show star as well.
"What do we think? We think it's real?" he deadpanned, to which Caleb offered, "What I'm saying is, for my friend Kumail, you're up there with Jennifer Aniston."
Kumail, however, thinks the former first couple can do better—and the ex-commander-in-chief has already reached peak partnership, for that matter.
"I think Michelle's slumming it," he cracked. "And to be honest, no shade to Jen, Barack's slumming it too."
Because, he explained, "Michelle Obama is a very high bar to clear. And I love Jennifer Aniston, I'm genuinely a huge fan."
And if the Obamas took time to comment on every rumor about them, they'd have very little free time. But they have been increasingly outspoken since leaving the White House in 2017, so here's a sampling of their most candid confessions:
Barack Obama Was in No Rush to Get Married
Not that Harvard Law student Barack Obama wasn’t in love with Michelle Obama (then Michelle Robinson), the associate assigned to look after him when he was an intern at her Chicago firm in the summer of 1988.
He just hadn’t thought about what came next all that much.
“For Michelle, marriage was a given—the organic next step in a relationship as serious as ours,” the former president wrote in his 2020 memoir A Promised Land. “For me, someone who'd grown up with a mother whose marriages didn't last, the need to formalize a relationship had always felt less pressing."
They tied the knot Oct. 3, 1992.
Michelle Obama Did Not Want Barack Obama to Run for President
While Michelle publicly supported Barack every step of the way to him winning the presidency in 2008, she really didn’t want her husband to run at all.
“‘The answer is no. I do not want you running for president,’” he recalled his wife saying in A Promised Land. “’God, Barack, when is it going to be enough?’”
On NPR’s Wild Card podcast in June 2025, Michelle called her and Barack’s accomplishments “the team ambition,” which she went along with, “arguably kicking and screaming.”
Michelle Obama Didn’t Think Barack Obama Would Win the 2008 Presidential Election
In her 2018 memoir Becoming, Michelle wrote that she “had faith” in her husband but was “harboring a painful thought, one I wasn’t ready to share: I supported him in campaigning, but I also felt certain he wouldn’t make it all the way.”
Michelle Obama Was Mad at Barack Obama for All 8 Years of His Presidency
“I’ve never fully got out of the dog house for this,” the former president told Stephen Colbert in November 2020. That is, for putting his family “through an extraordinarily stressful, difficult sequence in deciding to run for president, right after I had just gone through a tough [Senate] race.”
And "Michelle stayed angry at me about it," he added. "It would flare up every so often, but she stayed mad about it through all eight years."
The Obamas Went to Marriage Counseling
Michelle confessed that her husband’s schedule once he entered politics—he was elected to the Illinois state legislature in 1997—took its toll on their marriage.
“I’m flailing in the wind,” Michelle told Oprah Winfrey for Elle in 2018. “And now I’ve got two kids, and I’m trying to hold everything down while he’s traveling back and forth from Washington or Springfield.”
Subsequently, there was “work we had to do as a couple,” she said. “Counseling we had to do to work through this stuff."
The Obamas Were Skeptical About Hamilton
Lin-Manuel Miranda famously performed a song from his then-unfinished, future smash hit Hamilton at the White House in 2015. And you had to hear it to believe it, according to the president.
After learning that Lin was writing a hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton, Barack wrote in A Promised Land, “We were politely encouraging but secretly skeptical, until he got up onstage and started dropping beats and the audience went absolutely nuts.”
Why Michelle Obama Didn’t Go to Donald Trump’s Inauguration
After spending Donald Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 “trying just to hold myself together,” as Michelle wrote in Becoming, she wasn’t going to put herself through that again.
“One of the major decisions I made this year was to stay put and not attend funerals and inaugurations and all the things that I'm supposed to attend,” Michelle, who also skipped the January 2025 state funeral for Jimmy Carter, said on Wild Card, acknowledging the speculation that was kicked up in her wake. “Those are my choices. Whatever the backlash was, I had to sit in it and own it. But I didn't regret it, you know?”
Michelle Obama Thinks About Death a Lot Because She Loves Life
“My husband thinks this is morbid, but at 61, you know, if I am lucky, if I am truly blessed, I have like 25 more summers,” Michelle told Wild Card host Rachel Martin. “If you're not mindful about time, like—we've been out of office for 10 years.”
She wanted “the next 10 years to go by slowly,” she explained. “Because guess what? I love life. I love my life…But what I feel is that if I'm not mindful about it, the years slip away.”
Why Michelle Obama Will Never Run for President
Michelle will not be putting her daughters Malia Obama and Sasha Obama through the aspiring-first-family experience again.
“When people ask me would I ever run, the answer is no,” she said on a March 2025 episode of Kylie Kelce’s Not Gonna Lie podcast. “If you ask me that, then you have absolutely no idea the sacrifice that your kids make when your parents are in that role.”
Even if she was interested, Michelle added, “The thought of putting my girls back into that spotlight when they are just now establishing themselves…They’ve already served their time.”
Michelle Obama Is Glad She and Barack Obama Don’t Have a Son
“I'm so glad I didn't have a boy," Michelle said on IMO in June 2025. Asked by guest Angie Martinez why they didn’t try for baby No. 3, she cracked, "Because he would've been a Barack Obama. I would've felt for him."
What the Obamas Really Think About Divorce Rumors
“The fact that people don't see me going out on a date with my husband sparks rumors of the end of our marriage,” a bemused Michelle said on Wild Card. “It's like, ‘OK, so we don't Instagram every minute of our lives. We are 60.”
She also promised that she wouldn’t be demure about it if there was trouble in paradise.
"If I were having problems with my husband, everybody would know about it," she shared on an April 2025 episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast. "And he would know it and everybody would know it. I'm not a martyr…And I would be problem-solving in public, and be like, 'Let me tell you what he did.'”
Sitting in on his wife and brother-in-law's podcast in July 2025, Barack joked that the rumors were behind them because “she took me back.”