Who is Tracker's wife in real life? Justin Hartley met her on a soap set and married her quietly in 2021

Justin Hartley's wife is actress Sofia Pernas — and if her face looks familiar to Tracker viewers, that's because she's on the show too, playing Billie Matalon, the fellow reward-seeker from Colter Shaw's past. Off camera, the two go back a full decade, to a soap stage in Burbank.

First meeting: Genoa City, 2015

Hartley and Pernas met on The Young and the Restless, where he played Adam Newman and she played Marisa Sierras from 2015 to 2016. Nothing romantic happened. Hartley was with Chrishell Stause at the time; he married Stause in October 2017 and the two announced their split in late 2019, a divorce later chronicled — to Hartley's visible displeasure — on Selling Sunset.

The reconnection with Pernas came in 2020. They were dating by that fall and went Instagram-official on New Year's Eve, with Hartley posting a black-and-white photo captioned with a farewell to 2020.

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The wedding: two swimsuits, one masked officiant

They married in spring 2021 and told nobody. The confirmation came sideways — both showed up to the May 2021 MTV Movie & TV Awards wearing wedding bands, and People confirmed the marriage shortly after. Hartley finally described the ceremony on The Tonight Show in October 2024, calling it "the best wedding in the world."

The actual ceremony: a justice of the peace arrived at the house in a Covid mask, and the couple climbed out of their own pool to say their vows — still in bathing suits.

The idea came together in that same pool, mid-conversation. As courtship-to-altar pipelines go, it's hard to beat for efficiency.

Who Sofia Pernas is

Born in Morocco to a Spanish father and Moroccan mother, Pernas moved to California at age five and speaks Arabic, English, Spanish, and German. Her resume runs well beyond daytime:

• The Young and the Restless (2015–2016) — Marisa Sierras, the role that put her on Hartley's set.
• Jane the Virgin — Catalina, Jane's glamorous Venezuelan cousin.
• The Brave (2017) — NBC's special-ops drama.
• Blood & Treasure (2019–2022) — lead role as antiquities thief Lexi Vaziri on CBS.
• Quantum Leap (2022) — a guest arc opposite her husband, their first on-screen pairing as a married couple.

Billie on Tracker

Pernas debuted on Tracker on March 24, 2024 — a few weeks after the series premiered in the post-Super Bowl slot — helping Colter track down a missing racehorse. Billie has kept recurring since, through the season 3 finale on May 24, 2026. Speaking to TV Insider in 2024, Pernas said the cliché about marrying your best friend happens to be true in her case, and praised Hartley as the rare co-star who always knows his lines.

Hartley, for his part, told Haute Living in December 2021:

"I'm very lucky to not only have found 'The One,' but I found her when she was available and the timing was right."

Eleven years after Genoa City, CBS is effectively paying them to flirt on camera. Some career arcs work out.

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