Minnie Driver Explains Why Marrying Ex Josh Brolin Would Have Been 'the Biggest Mistake' of Her Life

Looking back, Driver feels she did not understand what she wanted out of relationships at the time of her first engagement.

By Michael Hein

Actress Minnie Driver opened up about her love life in an interview with The Times this weekend, just as she looked back on the rest of her career. Driver is promoting her upcoming role as Queen Elizabeth I in The Serpent Queen, and taking the chance to look back on her career and her life in the public eye. She says that if she had gone through with her wedding to Josh Brolin, it would have been "the biggest mistake of my life."

Driver and Brolin were briefly engaged in 2001, but broke up before saying their vows. However, she didn't come at the topic directly in her interview – she was reflecting on the passing of her mother and how it impacted her life and career. She noted that her mother "was a very difficult, complicated person," and she chose an odd time to reveal why she had separated from Driver's father. He apparently had a second family, and Driver's mother not only needed to flee that situation but quickly find a new husband in order to keep custody of her daughter.

"I had such an aversion to my stepfather, and I think she told me [that] in quite a selfish way, to try to make me feel better about her choices," Driver said. "As opposed to explaining to her kid what was going on, she told me in a fight, in a moment of rage, which was not good, but I understand it. Maybe that's about getting older – all the faulted stuff about your parents you just go, 'Oh yes, I know why they did that, because I did something similar last week.'"

The interviewer wondered if all this family drama at the formative age of 12 had impacted Driver's approach to romance and family in the long term. Driver said: "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. 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."

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"The one time I was engaged it would have been, I think the biggest mistake of my life," she said, referencing Brolin. "But now I'm with someone 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."

Few details were reported about Driver and Brolin's relationship or their breakup, but Driver's love life in general has always been a matter of great public interest. As she mentioned above, her current partner is Addison O'Dea. The two got together in 2019 and have been dating ever since. From the sound of it, they do not plan on making any vows, and are happy without them.

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