Minnie Driver has nothing to hide. The Good Will Hunting star, 54, opened up in a lengthy interview with The Times published on Saturday, July 6, about her previous relationship with actor Josh Brolin.
Driver and the Dune star, 56, were engaged in 2001 and broke up that same year after a 5-month courtship.
“The one time I was engaged, it would have been, I think, the biggest mistake of my life,” Driver told the British publication.
The Ella Enchanted actress had also revealed in The Times profile about how her parents, Gaynor and Charles, had never married due to her father’s infidelities. Their relationship had influenced the way she views her own love affairs.
“If I look at my history, what it did was make me want to be married so much and then choose men who were so not the right men to be married to,” she added.
“So I would carry on longing to be married and to have that conservative version [of a relationship], find men who had no interest in that, and then if one did, run a mile,” she noted.
Driver continued: “But now I’m with someone [the American writer and director Addison O’Dea] who doesn’t want to get married but who is the most devoted, loving, extraordinary… Everything I could have wanted in my childhood idea of a husband, he actually is.”
O’Dea and Driver have been dating since 2019 after meeting at a party in Los Angeles.
The Serpent Queen star even got candid about taking a step back from making films when her son Henry was born. She welcomed him with TV producer and ex Timothy J. Lea in 2008.
Minnie Driver and Josh Brolin Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc
Because she felt that she grew up “being unused to certainty,” she wanted to present Henry, 15, with a different view of life.
“It’s why I stopped making movies, really consciously,” she said. “I called my agent and went, ‘OK, I’m having a baby and I would really like you to go and look for a show… in Los Angeles and will pay me a regular wage.”
Driver added that because she was a new mom, she didn’t want to be traveling so much for filming and looked for more work closer to home.
“As a single mum, I didn’t want him to have that uncertainty. I wanted him to have school and football and mates and tea and his own bed and our house,” she said.
Her prominent TV roles included Will & Grace, About a Boy and Speechless.
“And it was so lovely because with what you consciously give your children, you can perhaps at the same time be giving yourself the thing that you did not have.”
