Steve Carell has explained the "lame" and "super uncool" way he asked his wife Nancy Walls out on a date.

The couple first met when Nancy enrolled as a student in an improvisation class Steve was teaching for The Second City comedy organisation in Chicago, Illinois and the Rooster star has confessed he initially thought she "hated him" because she was so frosty in his classes.

During an appearance on the Good Hang With Amy Poehler podcast, Steve said: "I was teaching … and she was in my improvisation class … She's cool and nice and sweet to everyone ...

"I thought she hated my guts because I'd be teaching and talking and … nothing. Dead eyes. No affect in her face at all. And I was like 'boy she's not buying any of this. She hates me. She hates this class, knows I'm a phoney and it turns out she was just nervous. That's what she told me later …

"She just doesn't want to show anything [when she's nervous]."

Steve started to get to know Nancy outside of class when he was hanging out in a nearby bar where she was working as a waitress and it led to a very awkward conversation about a potential first date.

He said: "She worked across the street she was a waitress across the street at a bar called The Last Act so after shows or after class I used to go over and sit at the bar and I'd order a Diet Cole and we'd sit and talk.

"But it took so long because we both kind of talked around the whole thing like forever. Finally one day the conversation went something like … We were talking about people that we like or who would you go out with? ...

"And I think I finally said: 'If I were going to ask someone on a date, it would be somebody like you. You'd be that template of somebody of I'd love to go out with'.

"And she's like: 'If somebody like you, asked me out, I would love it, that would be fantastic'. Then there was a pause and I said: 'Do you wanna go out?'

"It was so lame. It was so super uncool ... So we went two doors down to the other bar and that was the start of it."

The couple went on to get engaged and Steve revealed Nancy landed her big break on sketch show Saturday Night Live just days later.

He said: "We were engaged a week before she got SNL. We went on our honeymoon and moved straight to New York for her to start rehearsals."

Steve and Nancy married in 1995 and went on to become parents to two children together, Elisabeth and John.