Minnie Driver is candid about her relationship history and previous engagement to Josh Brolin in a new interview.
Minnie Driver is reflecting on her past relationships. The 54-year-old actress makes a candid confession about her early aughts engagement to Josh Brolin in a new interview.
The comments come amid a larger conversation about the family dynamic she grew up with. The star says that her father, Ronnie, was married to another woman during his 16-year relationship with her mother and that he had two families.
"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 tells the U.K.'s The Times. "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."
Driver adds, "The one time I was engaged [to Brolin in 2001] it would have been, I think, the biggest mistake of my life."
Today, the London-born actress is unmarried, but in a committed relationship with American writer-director Addison O'Dea.
"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," she gushed to The Times.
For his part, Brolin is now married to Kathryn Boyd. The couple shares two daughters, 5-year-old Westlyn and 3-year-old Chapel. He also shares two adult children, 36-year-old Trevor and 29-year-old Eden, with his ex-wife, Alice Adair. Additionally, Brolin was married to actress Diane Lane from 2004 to 2013.
Driver is mom to 15-year-old son Henry, whom she welcomed in 2008 amid a shortlived romance with TV writer Timothy J. Lea.
"It's why I stopped making movies, really consciously," she now tells The Times. "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 that’s called Shoots in Los Angeles and will pay me a regular wage."
She continues, "I couldn’t be travelling. I couldn’t be taking a tiny baby to Romania — and I didn’t want to. 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."
During that time, Driver gave memorable performances in the sitcoms About a Boy and Will & Grace.
"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," she says of the schedule that allowed her to spend more time at home.
Driver also famously dated Matt Damon after meeting on the set of Good Will Hunting in 1997.
In 2022 -- while promoting her memoir, Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essay -- Driver spoke to ET about her brief and "sweet" romance with Damon, and how the public fallout from their 1998 split added to the pain.
"I don't care who you are, that is agony and it's like a strange, surreal dream," Driver said of the tabloid fodder that surrounded their breakup. "But I know he didn't put that picture there. It's so tricky, because it's not deliberate, he couldn't have helped how famous he became and how his life was being picked over, in the same way that mine was."
Driver is currently promoting her role in season 2 of Starz's The Serpent Queen, playing Queen Elizabeth I.
Speaking with ET in April, Driver said she underwent more than three hours of hair and makeup each day to become the "Virgin Queen."
"It was a very long process transforming into Queen Elizabeth I but it was truly, truly incredible," she said. "It is the most amazing show, The Serpent Queen, this summer -- I can't wait."
She added, "[It was] about three-and-a-half hours, and that was with wardrobe as well, like, it was intense. ... Incredible hair and makeup, incredible costumes, that's what I signed up for, you know? That's where it all began, you want to play dress-up as a kid."
She also told ET that she regards her character as one of the most memorable of her career.
"She's fierce, believe me, I have not been able to let go of Queen Elizabeth I. I will be devoted to her forever," Driver said. "I mean, as a Brit, it's astonishing, it's an honor and it's really exciting."
Season 2 of The Serpent Queen premieres on July 12 on Starz.
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