Reba McEntire Teases Onscreen ‘Happy’s Place’ Romance With Boyfriend Rex Linn: ‘In Season 7’
Reba McEntire brought country to Hollywood at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards.
The “Fancy” singer, 69, stepped out at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles for the awards show on Sunday, September 15, with her former Reba costar Melissa Peterman. McEntire wore an emerald green pantsuit with a sequined silver top and accessorized with a trio of star brooches on her lapel, while Peterman, 53, opted for a periwinkle cape dress with a floral neckline.
While speaking to Laverne Cox during E!'s red carpet coverage, McEntire and Peterman discussed their new sitcom, Happy's Place, which also stars McEntire's boyfriend, Rex Linn. According to McEntire, however, her and Linn's characters won't be getting together on screen.
"It's a possibility later on, like, in season 7," the country star quipped to Cox, 52.
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McEntire is set to present an award during Sunday’s ceremony. She’ll soon be back on the small screen in Happy’s Place, which debuts on NBC Friday, October 18. She plays a woman named Bobbie who inherits her father’s bar following his death. Linn, 67, stars as a cook named Emmett.
Earlier this year, McEntire said it was “lovely” getting to work with Linn on the show. “We love working together,” she told Extra in May. “What’s really the best part about it, he’s my coach. So when we’re home, he’s helping me with my lines and to memorize. He’s wonderful. He helps me a lot.”
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McEntire and Linn initially met in 1991 while filming The Gambler Returns with the late Kenny Rogers. At the time, McEntire was married to Narvel Blackstock, with whom she shares son Shelby, 34, but she and Linn “occasionally” kept in touch over the years. They reconnected in 2020 when McEntire filmed a guest spot on Young Sheldon. (She divorced Blackstock, 68, in 2015.)
According to McEntire, she and Linn went out to dinner with friends after work one night, and she “started seeing Rex in a whole new light.” They started texting amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and quickly hit it off.
“We talked for hours every day,” she recalled in her 2023 book, Not That Fancy. “All we could do was talk! But that wasn’t a bad thing. It gave us a chance to get to know each other better. From the very first call, I was just my honest self with him — never any pretense or performance. We were just ‘us,’ and it worked.”
That initial dinner also sparked their nicknames for one another: sugar tot and tater tot. The monikers came about because McEntire ordered tater tots at that first outing.
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“I love tater tots,” she wrote. “Rex is famous for giving people nicknames. When he heard me say ‘tater tots,’ he said, ‘That’s our nickname.’ And that’s what he still calls me today.” (She calls him sugar tot.)
In addition to McEntire and Linn, Happy’s Place also stars Peterman, who previously acted alongside McEntire on her first sitcom, Reba, which aired from 2001 to 2007.
"We've been friends ever since," Peterman told Entertainment Weekly in July. "We've done other things together. I got to go on tour with her and open the show and do stand-up, and we vacation together. We hang out, and we just were waiting for another project so we could actually go to work together again.”
