Jamie Chung and Bryan Greenberg on Their Grown-Up Style, Surviving the Terrible Twos, and Taking on “Suits: L.A.”

Chung says she's finally finding her groove as a twin mom, as Greenberg (literally) suits up for Hollywood's hottest spinoff

Jamie Chung and Bryan Greenberg are firmly in their toddler era.

The parents of 2-and-a-half-year-old twins arrive at the StyleWatch shoot raring to go. No matter the wet, gloomy Los Angeles weather. “It's called a vacation,” cracks Chung, 41, as the couple embrace a few rare diaper-free hours together.

“I used to judge people before I had kids,” adds Greenberg, 45. “And be like, "Oh, I would never let my kid watch TV. And now we have twins; we're just in survival mode. And I'm like, ‘If we got to put the iPad on and we're at a restaurant, don't judge us. Give us a break.’ "

Easy relatability is kind of their thing. Together since 2012, the couple married at a Santa Barbara glampsite over a Halloween weekend in 2015 and welcomed their children in 2021. On a day with rain pelting the windows, they make a low-key arrival at a downtown Los Angeles loft sans entourage, publicists or driver. Chung is giving weatherproof luxe, pairing a tailored long black wool coat, a black turtleneck and matching trousers with chunky Prada loafers.

The Lovecraft Country actress, whose laid-back interpretation of trends has long made her a fashion favorite, has been gravitating toward classic pieces lately. “Once we had the kids, it was like, "I mean, did I shower today? Who cares?” she says. “Now that the kids are a little bit older and there's more routine and we're getting solid sleep, I feel like I'm finding myself again—and I'm finding my style again.”

Today family members are watching the boys (whose names the couple have chosen to keep private) and Greenberg is leaving the next morning to shoot the hotly anticipated Suits: L.A. NBC pilot in Vancouver.  “We do try to carve out individual time for ourselves to be together,” he says. “It's imperative because you are a unit. You have to be a unified front for the children, and you’ve got to take care of home base.”

Related: Jamie Chung and Bryan Greenberg's Relationship Timeline

The two actors were both hitting the gas on separate careers when they first met over a decade ago. Having concluded his One Tree Hill run, the Omaha-born Greenberg was hopping between rom-coms like Bride Wars and Friends With Benefits and earning critical acclaim for his scrappy turn in the HBO hit series How to Make It in America. It was his street sensibility that first caught Chung’s eye.

“The reason why I was attracted to Bryan was because he had a very strong sense of his own style,” says Chung, a San Francisco native who jumped into the public eye on MTV’s reality series The Real World: San Diego before springboarding her acting career with projects like Grown Ups, The Hangover Part II and III, The Gifted and Once Upon a Time.

From the get-go, Chung had sartorial command, appearing regularly in the pages of People StyleWatch while offering her take on trends in her popular lifestyle blog What the Chung.

“Even when I first met Jamie, she would cut out magazine pages of looks,” recalls Greenberg. “This is before she had a blog, and before Instagram, any of this stuff.” Adds Chung: “And I would put it in my closet, and Bryan was like, ‘What is this, high school? Is this your high school locker?’ I’ve always loved fashion.”

Chung says Greenberg has maintained one constant: “He still loves sneakers, but that's who he is. So he just looks like he's forever 25.”

“What do you have against 25-year-olds?” retorts her husband.

“I don't,” she volleys back. “They're hot.”

Related: Jamie Chung and Bryan Greenberg Share Adorable Photo of Twin Sons in the Bathtub: 'Rub a Dub Dub'

Since marrying in 2015, the couple have navigated career surges, a pandemic and infants. Now they’re knee-deep in a real world full of big feelings, endless snacks and Thomas the Tank Engine. And these days they’re no longer the boss.

Their full-circle wedding moment

Theirs is a late-aughts Young Hollywood kind of love story: They met poolside at a Nylon magazine party, but the timing wasn’t right; Greenberg wasn’t available and Chung was freshly single. “I just remember thinking, ‘I'm miserable in my relationship, and that girl is awesome,’ ” he recalls.

They wouldn’t see each other again for almost five years until Chung heard her crush was having dinner in New York City with a mutual friend. “I snuck in,” she grins, and again sparks flew. But another year passed. Finally syncing up in Los Angeles, they became a couple. Sort of. “Then he broke up with me for two weeks, and I erased his number and I was heartbroken,” Chung recalls.

Greenberg quickly reversed course and called her. “It was the first time I ever heard his voice on a phone; he's a texter, even though he's a big talker in real life,” recalls Chung. “He asked me back and I said, ‘Maybe.’ ”

He had one big move left. Chung’s film Eden was at the South by Southwest festival that year, which Greenberg had waffled on attending with her. “We got back together. I was like, ‘Hey, is that offer still on the table for South by Southwest? I'd love to come with you,’ ” he recalls. Once he was there, what he saw onscreen bowled him over. “I was so blown away by her performance,” he remembers. “I fell in love. I was really scared because I was like, ‘Oh my God, she's fantastic, and I'm screwed.’ "

Three years later they threw an epic California wedding, launching festivities with a costumed welcome party (he was Marty from Back to the Future Part II; she went full Troop Beverly Hills) followed by elegant nuptials at the eco-friendly El Capitan Canyon resort in Santa Barbara. Against a backdrop of oak trees and wooden yurts, Chung switched from a Monique Lhuillier silk tulle ceremony gown to a lace Jonathan Simkhai reception dress. Greenberg recalls crying under the chuppah, taking them both by surprise. “I did not expect it was going to be that emotional,” says Greenberg.

The couple returned to the site this past March, this time as a family of four. Idyllic Instagram photos posted by Chung show their curious boys exploring rocky beaches against the jutting Santa Ynez mountains. The reality of taking energetic 2-year-olds on spring break? “Don't do it,” warns Chung. “We cut it a day short too,” confesses Greenberg, as Chung levels on why the bleary-eyed pair drove back early: “We couldn't handle it because we needed proper sleep.”

‘There is no toddler fashion’

A proper day among adults can do wonders. At the downtown Los Angeles shoot, the photogenic couple are in turn tactile and bantering, turning a frigid downtown warehouse downright balmy dancing to songs like Reyna Tropical’s No Me Quieres and Nelly’s Shake Ya Tailfeather. Dressed in coordinating icy blue spring looks, Chung reclines across on a distressed leather couch as Bryan sweetly rests his head on her hip—and then devilishly presses his cold knuckles into her neck. In between outfit changes they snack on breakfast burritos with hot sauce, and when Jamie emerges in a sleeveless blazer-style dress, Greenberg slings an appreciative arm around her shoulder: “You look so hot!”

Greenberg’s sense of style has grown up over the last few years: “I used to hate suits, and now it feels nice to dress up.” At recent events for Junction, his directorial debut about the opioid crisis inspired by his own scary brush with OxyContin following a hernia surgery years ago, the actor donned a custom gold pendant commissioned by his wife. “My family made their own family crest back in the 1800s because Jews didn't really have family crests, so they made up their own. It got passed along in the family, and Jamie created it as a gift,” he says. “I rock it with pride.”

(His attempts at shopping for Chung haven’t gone quite so well. “I got her shoes and stuff and she's like, ‘Ew,’ ” he says, before Chung clarifies, “I'm sorry, he got me the Nicki Minaj bright pink Jordans from [the 'Anaconda' music video].” Greenberg: “And that's the last time I bought her shoes.”)

Chung appears briefly in Junction (“I let him boss me around for a day,” she kids) and supported her husband on red carpets for his passion project. But given its indie size, the movie could not offer a styling budget. “So the last couple of events, it's been just me,” says Chung, who sourced a chic semi-sheer Grace Ling look ahead of Junction’s Los Angeles premiere, which played nicely against Greenberg's self-described "mob chic" Todd Snyder black tux and layered chains. "We do try to at least coordinate a little bit," says Chung.

For the People’s Choice Awards in February, Chung headed to the Albright Fashion Library, a private archive studio in Los Angeles that offers vintage gowns and looks straight from the runway, where she pulled a lilac Oscar de la Renta mini dress and a whimsical crystal-adorned Frolov Bra Bag. “Even when I did have stylists, I would be very direct about what I liked and what I didn't like,” she says.

Still, they draw the line at persuading the twins to wear, well, anything. “There is no toddler fashion,” says Greenberg, who learned the hard way not to invest in tiny kicks. “As a sneakerhead, I'm like, ‘Oh, we got all these cool little Jordans.’ And they never wore them.”

Putting his own spin on Suits 

These long days blurred into short years are a smorgasbord of indelible core memories, exhaustion and methodical puzzling of career opportunities: more is more. Aside from carving out a small window to celebrate Passover together, in the past month Greenberg has hopped between Vancouver to Chicago while shooting the Suits: L.A. pilot and his MGM+ series The Emperor of Ocean Park. He auditioned three times for the Suits spinoff (a project even Chung went in to read for).

Greenberg has watched a few episodes of the USA Network legal drama, which has experienced a resurgence since arriving on Netflix last summer, but he’s holding out on a full binge as he works on crafting a new character.

“I've never been a part of a pilot that's had this much hype and a worldwide audience around it,” says Greenberg. “I'm trying to tune all that out and just do the work. What I love about it is that I get to do what I love to do. It’s comedy and drama, and it's a great character I get to play. And I hope the world gets to see it.”

Related: NBCUniversal Orders a Pilot for Suits Spinoff, Suits L.A.

In May their shared calendar tips to Chung, who will begin the revenge comedy Stone Cold Fox in Los Angeles before her next film, Seeing Red, starts production in Australia. The juggle is real, but it works thanks to the villages of friends and family they've built around the homes they alternate between in New York (his preference) and Los Angeles (where they currently reside).

“We're gypsies, we float, and we're just in the carnival, so we’ve got to figure out…” Greenberg starts. “We're going to stay in L.A.,” Chung winks.

At home sanity prevails with attempts at a shared load. “We came up with a rule that we would cook an even amount of nights, every other night, and we would share Sundays,” says Chung, teasing, “And whenever he does cook, I'll see what he's cooking, and then I'll just cook my own meal for the kids and me.”

“So there's no point in me cooking,” interjects Greenberg, who calls his efforts in the kitchen “terrible.”

“Yeah, but I give him an A for effort, because he really is trying,” she says. 

As their children’s personalities begin to bloom, this stage is “so sweet and fun,” says Chung, who believes in candor about this stage of her life, having previously opened up about the “tender topic” of the couple’s fertility journey.

“I just can't fake it,” says the actress, who was equally transparent about coping with postpartum depression. “I mean, I just had a massive breakdown the other day, and I was like, ‘I don't know what I signed up for. I didn't know it was going to be this hard.’ And then the next day I'm like, ‘Okay, let's go! What do you guys want to do today? Should we color? Should we do some things?’ ”

Twindom, in the end, has taught the couple how to show up for each other. Chung is working on assuaging her mom guilt (“It’s real”). Greenberg is preparing to tag in after weeks on the road. “We've never communicated this much in our entire lives,” says Chung.

Just don’t poke the bear on who’s currently commanding more closet space.

“Because I moved into a house that he already owned, I have little closets everywhere. I'm running around naked trying to get dressed,” says Chung.

Greenberg grins. “And who doesn't want that?”

Credits

Photographer Eric Michael Roy

Cinematographer Eric Longden

Hair Amaran Asylum

Makeup Freddy Castro

Manicurist Sheila Monaus/Zenobia Agency

Stylist Heidi Meek/The Wall Group

Prop Stylist Wanted PD

Up Next: Up Next: Go Inside Jamie Chung and Bryan Greenberg's Sweet, Stylish People StyleWatch Shoot

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