Josh Duhamel had a new way of describing his 21-year age gap with Audra Mari: he said he is “officially too old” for her. The remark came on a July 13 appearance on The HoneyDew With Ryan Sickler, after he said a photo of himself holding his newborn sister Cassidy as a 21-year-old made the comparison impossible to miss.
Duhamel said he looked at the image and then at Mari and realized that she and Cassidy are exactly the same age. “You and Cassidy are exactly the same age,” he said he told his wife, before adding, “I am officially too old for you.” The joke landed because it turned a familiar celebrity age gap into something more personal, tied to a family snapshot from long before he and Mari were married.
That marriage began in September 2022 in Fargo, N.D., after the two had dated for roughly three years. Duhamel was 53 and Mari was 32 when he made the comment, and the couple now share two children: Shepherd, 2, and Rocca, who was born in May 2026. He also has an older son, Axl, 12, with Fergie.
The age-gap comment adds a fresh, lighter note to a relationship Duhamel has already described in public before. In September 2023, he said he first connected with Mari by sliding into her DMs after she had won some pageants in North Dakota, then invited her to a BBQ and told the hosts, “Wow, you’re beautiful.” He later said, “We started dating and, you know, here we are, five years later, with a baby on the way.”
What makes the new remark work is the contradiction inside it. Duhamel was joking about being too old for Mari while describing a marriage that is still very much his present tense, not a memory. The family math — Cassidy’s age, Mari’s age, the 21-year gap — gives the line its bite, but the real story is that he is now talking about that gap with a kind of affectionate bluntness that only family photos can bring out.
The unresolved piece is not whether the couple have moved on; they clearly have, with two children and a marriage that began in 2022. What remains open is how much of that private history Duhamel is willing to keep turning into public material, and whether this is just a one-night joke or the way he now talks about a relationship that has already outlasted the age-gap headline.
