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For James Corden, it was love at first sight when he met wife Julia Carey.

Sitting down with PEOPLE’s editor-in-chief Jess Cagle for the latest episode of The Jess Cagle Interview, the Late Late Show host reveals the touching story of how the couple hit it off pretty much instantly.

At the time, Carey was working for Save the Children, and Corden’s good friend, actor Dominic Cooper, invited Corden to attend an event the nonprofit was organizing.

“I said, ‘I’m really enjoying this sort of thing — like, cooking dinner, falling asleep, not really drinking,’ ” recalls Corden. “And he said, ‘Come on, let’s go, it’ll be fun.’ Thank God he persuaded me.”

James Corden and Julia Carey

When Cooper introduced the two, Corden couldn’t help himself.

“I said, ‘Hi, Jules. You might be the most beautiful woman in the world,’ ” he says. “She said, ‘Well, thank you very much. That sounds like something you say a lot.’ And I said, ‘I’ve never said it before in my life.’ That was it. That was it, really. I was in. And by an absolute miracle, so was she.”

  • For more on James Corden, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on stands Friday

Corden says he and Carey spent the night sitting in the corner together while Cooper was “off getting into trouble.”

“We sat and we very jokingly kind of planned the rest of our lives together, an hour and a half after we met,” he reveals. “As a joke! We were just talking. And we were both talking about how much we felt like we were now past the notion of going out every night — that we had hit the age where the prospect of a quiet night in was glorious.”

“I remember saying to her, ‘Well, what about on Friday we could do nothing together? You could come over and we could just do nothing. And then maybe we could do nothing on the Saturday, and we could do nothing on the Sunday. And if our evenings are enough of nothing, then maybe this would be come something,’ ” he says. “And she said, ‘That sounds like a fun idea.’ ”

Corden and Carey went on to tie the knot in 2012 and now share son Max, 7, and daughters Charlotte, 6 months, and Carey, 3½.

The Late Late Show is broadcasting from London’s Central Hall Westminster through Thursday at 12:37 a.m. ET on CBS.

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