On October 25, 2021, Reba McEntire opened the second season of her Living & Learning podcast by handing the guest microphone to Rex Linn after thirty years of friendship.
A year earlier, on an October 2020 episode alongside co-host Melissa Peterman and guest Kristin Chenoweth, Reba had surprised listeners by revealing that she and the veteran actor had been dating since June. Sitting across from Rex for the 2021 premiere, New Relationships with Rex Linn, the pair detailed how three decades as colleagues turned into love.
Their history began in 1991 on the set of Kenny Rogers’ Western television movie The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw. Both shared deep Oklahoma roots, with Reba raised on a cattle ranch in Chockie and Rex growing up in Oklahoma City before graduating from Oklahoma State University.
During the podcast conversation, Rex explained that the foundation of their bond formed in August 1998 on the day of his mother Darlene’s funeral. While mourners filled the house in Oklahoma City, his sister pulled him aside to say he had a phone call he should take, sending him back to sit on the bed in his childhood bedroom.
Reba was on the line, telling him she understood what he was going through and simply wanted to talk with him. They spoke for twenty-five minutes, a quiet gesture Rex told her on air had lifted him up and stayed with him for the next twenty-two years.
Over the decades that followed, while Reba was married to Narvel Blackstock until their 2015 divorce and Rex built an acting career on shows like CSI: Miami, they stayed in touch through mutual friends. In late January 2020, overlapping roles on the sitcom Young Sheldon brought them to the same Los Angeles dinner table.
At a wine bar down the street after dinner, Rex joked on the podcast that Reba dove into a plate of tater tots like a great white shark, earning his nickname “Tater Tot” while she later called him “Sugar Tot”. Soon afterward, Reba learned that her ninety-three-year-old mother, Jacqueline McEntire, had bladder cancer.
Remembering his childhood bedroom in 1998, Rex told Reba to call anytime, and she admitted on the show that she quit texting right then so they could speak every day. After Jacqueline passed away on March 14, 2020, pandemic lockdowns canceled Reba’s tours and left her on the Oklahoma ranch while Rex isolated in California.
Two mornings later, on March 16, Rex began setting his alarm between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. Pacific Time to sit before his iPad with coffee by 7:30 a.m. in Oklahoma. Over daily FaceTime sessions they named Coffee Camp, Rex shared childhood stories of watching Clayton Moore in The Lone Ranger and Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man.
To brighten the ranch house where Reba stayed with her sister Susie and brother-in-law Mark Lunsford, Rex wore a custom tater tot shirt on screen and shipped food across the country. Reba told him on air that she saved the boxes and notes from the pecan pies, lobster rolls, and California’s McConnell’s ice cream while Mark asked each morning what was arriving next.
Reba explained to listeners that getting to know each other without any physical aspect to the relationship made their courtship unusually deep, allowing them to fall in love across 1,300 miles before ever holding hands.
When travel restrictions eased in June 2020, Rex admitted feeling as nervous as a young man driving to see the woman he had known strictly as a friend since 1991. Reba recalled that when they finally embraced on June 16, 2020, the connection felt like a magnet, leaving them nearly inseparable afterward.
Even when work later separated them between Tennessee and California, Rex told the podcast audience he sometimes logged into Coffee Camp at 3:00 a.m. so they would never miss a morning since March 16. That daily commitment carried them through co-starring roles on Big Sky and Happy’s Place and a Christmas Eve 2024 engagement.
Twenty-two years after a phone call to an Oklahoma City bedroom, two coffee mugs across a screen turned thirty years of friendship into home.