LIEV Schreiber was so anxious the first time he met Naomi Watts that he walked out of the party. And she chased him.

The 48-year-old actor opened up about his 10-year relationship with the Aussie actress in the latest edition of Esquire. Recalling the first time they met at the 2005 Met Gala in New York, Schreiber said he felt out of place at the fancy event, but when Watts entered “she was a ray of light”.

“She said, ‘What are you doing later on — you want to go dancing?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah’,” he told the mag.

“So I went down to this club that she told me to meet her at, and of course she was there with Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, and I’m kind of standing around like a bump on a log, waiting for my turn.”

With all the movie stars hovering around Watts, Schreiber said he felt “very embarrassed being there, and self-conscious”. Worried he wouldn’t impress her, he told Watts: “I’m sorry, but I gotta go home”.

But Watts didn’t let it end there.

“She chased me outside and said, ‘Don’t you want my digits?’,” he said.

Needless to say, he took her “digits”. Their first official date was near Magnolia Bakery in Manhattan’s West Village, where they ate cupcakes on a park bench.

“It was very silly, very romantic,” he said. “And we had a kiss, not a big kiss, but it was a kiss that was like, ooh. Then she went back to LA. and I wrote her all the time. Lots of emails. I think that was it — seduced by email.”

And from there, he fell hard.

“I decided I was going to make a family with this person,” he said. “For better or for worse, I stepped into a partnership with somebody. We were gonna bring kids into this world and try to love and respect each other.”

The couple share two sons — seven-year-old Alexander and six-year-old Samuel.