January Jones has confirmed she did go on "a couple of dates" with Nick Viall after he "slid into her DMs".
The 42-year-old actress previously insisted the pair were just friends following speculation they might be dating in 2018, but the ‘Mad Men’ star has revealed the pair hooked up after he messaged her when she had been "blasting" ‘The Bachelor’ star on talk shows because she was "so into" the series.
She said: "Nick slid into my DMs, and he’s like, ‘I’m so sorry that your perception of me is so negative, I’d love to take you out to coffee and see if I could change your mind.’ And I squealed.
"I was like, ‘I hate that guy,’ but my sister was like, ‘If you don’t go you will forever regret it.”
"So I agreed to go on a date with him – or to drinks, or whatever. As I met him I was rounding the corner and I saw him, and he has a very distinct walk, and I had this instinct to run up to him and wrap my legs around his waist, you know like they do? [But] I stopped myself."
January admits the date was "good" but insists all she did was "grill him about the show".
But the star admitted it resulted in "a couple of dates".
Speaking on Dax Shepard’s ‘Armchair Expert’ podcast, she added: "The thing that attracted me to Nick was that he seemed – I mean, he was cast as the quote-unquote villain, but he had a bit of a brain, so there was something else there.
"That’s all we were talking about, really. But I got a lot of juicy inside stuff."
In February 2018, January insisted she was not dating Nick.
She said at the time: "He’s a friend of mine. He’s super sweet. No, I’m single. But, he’s a friend of mine and tells me lots of inside scoops."
Previously, insiders had reported that the actress and the reality star had been seeing one another for around two months.
They claimed: "They’ve been dating for about two months. She went on ‘The Late Show’ in mid-November and said Nick had reached out to her and tried to get her to lip-sync battle with him. She declined, but then he asked her out to a drink and she accepted. They’ve been seeing each other since."