‘Today’: Carson Daly Talks Jenna Bush Hager Friendship, Praises Dylan Dreyer Amid Separation

Jenna Bush Hager and Carson Daly are just as much a family off-screen as they are on-screen.

Daly made his Today With Jenna & Friends cohosting debut on Thursday, November 6. “You are like family to me. I really do have a huge place in my heart for you,” he told Bush Hager at the top of the episode. “You remind me of my sister, Quinn, very much, who’s my favorite human. She’s a badass. She’s smart. She’s professionally crushing it. She’s an incredible sister, wife, mother. She’s funny, and you remind me so much of her.”

Daly noted that his and Bush Hager’s “love language” is poking fun at each other on-air and behind-the-scenes, adding, “We’re like brother and sister. … I love you to death, so, yeah, I’m psyched to be here with you.”

The hosts’ families also share a strong friendship. “We’ve had so many fun times with our families, so much so that my kids thought, for a period of time, that Carson’s kids were our cousins,” Bush Hager revealed. “They were like, ‘When are the cousins coming?’ I’m like, ‘Which cousins?’ They were like, ‘You know, London.’ I’m like, ‘She’s not your cousin.’”

Bush Hager shares three kids — Mila, 12, Poppy, 10, and Hal, 6 — with her husband, Henry Hager. Carson, meanwhile, is a father of four, sharing his kids Jackson, 16, Etta, 13, London, 11, and Goldie, 5, with his wife, Siri Daly.

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“People are like, ‘You seem to really get along with the people on the air at the Today show.’ And I say, ‘You have no idea.’ You can’t fake the funk. Like, we vacation together,” Carson said of his and Bush Hager’s Today colleagues. “This group that we have and this incarnation of the show is really special, and I think people watching the show don’t ever really know that. They don’t see that. We keep a lot of it private on purpose, but moments like this are fun because this is like being here with family.”

Carson is one of three Today hosts who made their Jenna & Friends cohosting debut this week, along with Craig Melvin and Dylan Dreyer. During Thursday’s episode, Carson took a moment to give Dreyer a special shoutout for opening up about her and her estranged husband Brian Fichera’s separation on the show the day prior.

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“[She] spoke so eloquently, vulnerable, and honest about her own personal situation with her husband and the divorce,” he said. “And it really resonated with me as a friend of hers, but also, I think, a lot of people right now. There’s a lot of divorce.”

Carson pointed out that people can take “different paths” to maintain a happy and healthy family and relationship. He used his own relationship as an example, noting that he and Siri didn’t follow the traditional route of getting married before starting a family.

“We had a kid, we had Jackson, in ’09. We got married in 2015, you know, six or seven years later after we had met. We had three kids when we got married,” Carson stated. “We moved to New York. We had another kid here in [New York]. You know, all the things.”

Dreyer will return to cohost Jenna & Friends on Friday, November 7.

Today With Jenna & Friends, Weekdays, 10 a.m./9c, NBC