I Want What They Have: Ryan and Zinzi Coogler

Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.

There’s nothing I find more heartwarming than a Hollywood spouse who believed in their partner long before they were famous. That’s why I’m so enthralled by the real-life romance between Sinners director Ryan Coogler and his wife, Zinzi Coogler. The Cooglers got married in 2016 and are now the parents of two children (with a third on the way!), bringing one of Ryan’s long-held wishes to life: “I found I want daughters real, real bad,” the director said in 2018, and I, for one, think we’d all be better off if more expectant dads vision-boarded their dreams for their families.

Before Ryan and Zinzi Coogler were parents or movie-premiere fixtures, though—promoting films like Creed and Black Panther—they were just a regular couple dating in college. As he recalled of that period in a 2018 interview: “I was trying to write [screenplays] in Microsoft Word. It’s impossible because your format gotta be right. I was broke, playing football on the little scholarship money. And my wife scrapped together some cheese and bought me Final Draft, which is the software that you write your movies on. And she got me that.”

Having now spent upwards of five years total in LA, I feel uniquely qualified to expound on just how romantic Zinzi’s gift actually was. You can’t throw a stone in this damn town without hitting an aspiring screenwriter, and when you’re putting together specs and trying to build a career for yourself, it makes all the difference in the world when the people in your life have confidence in you—as Zinzi clearly did in Ryan. That software’s not cheap, guys! Only a certified lover girl would pony up for the most updated version!

And now, it seems both their careers have taken off: While he’s the recipient of 10 NAACP Image Awards and has been nominated for two Oscars, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy, she’s a certified American Sign Language interpreter, as well as an assistant director and producer with credits on films including Creed III and Judas and the Black Messiah. Together with her husband and Sev Ohanian, Zinzi also founded the multimedia company Proximity Media in 2021.