Cheryl Hines Reveals Her Initial Response to RFK Jr. Telling Her He Wanted to Run for President.

Cheryl Hines never expected her life to land in the middle of American politics — or that she would someday be married to a man seriously pursuing the presidency.

In a new interview with The Times of London, the Curb Your Enthusiasm star recalled the moment her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., first floated the idea of running for the White House. Her initial reaction, she admitted, was pure disbelief.

“A few years ago, Bobby came to me and said, ‘How would you feel if I ran for president?’ ” she remembered. “And I said, ‘President of what?’ “

Hines, 60, genuinely assumed he was talking about “a board or a company,” not the Oval Office. When he clarified, “Of the United States,” she said she needed a moment to let it sink in.

“This had to be just between Bobby and me for a long time,” she explained. “If it were to get out, he would start getting attacked.”

The couple, who married in 2014, even developed a kind of code as they worked through the idea in private. They referred to the potential campaign as starting a “cookie company,” a lighthearted phrase that softened the weight of the long, emotional conversations about how their lives were likely to change.

In her new memoir, Unscripted, Hines writes about the dread that crept in as the possibility of a campaign became real. She likens it to “a giant wave in front of us that would hit us all at once, take us down to the bottom of the ocean, hold us under until we couldn’t breathe, and then spit us out… somewhere. Who knew where.”

Even with that fear, she said, she couldn’t bring herself to tell her husband not to pursue something he clearly felt called to do.

“He certainly gave me the opportunity to say no… But I can’t imagine what kind of a partner would say, ‘No, I don’t want you to pursue something that is so important to you,’ ” Hines said. “Nobody wants to live like that.”

“What’s the saying? You end up regretting the things you don’t do more than the things that you do,” she added. “So, in theory, I could have said no, but… It’s not how you treat somebody you love.”

Hines had once asked Kennedy directly if he had political ambitions, back when they started dating in 2011. “He said no,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Great. This is going to work out perfectly.’ ” At the time, he was focused on his work as an environmental lawyer, and she was firmly rooted in Hollywood. Neither of them saw what was coming.

Kennedy’s eventual independent presidential run — followed later by his endorsement of Donald Trump and his appointment as secretary of health and human services — pulled Hines into a political world she never anticipated.

The shift was abrupt and overwhelming. In her memoir, she describes breaking out in hives amid the frenzy, and she details the strain it put on her relationships in Hollywood and within the Kennedy family itself. She also acknowledges that her husband’s controversial positions on vaccines and other health issues caused tension in their marriage.

“It’s been a learning process,” she told The Times. “I learnt a lot about politics and people, and all the circus that comes with it.”

She said she now tries to avoid obsessing over coverage of her husband. “Most of the time I don’t even check because it doesn’t matter,” she explained. “And then there are moments when I will call and say, ‘What is happening?’ And then he’ll tell me the story.”

Reflecting on how dramatically their lives have changed, Hines admitted that none of it is what she would have scripted for herself. “I would never have written this one, never in a million years,” she said.