Minnie Driver says marrying Josh Brolin would have been “the biggest mistake”

Minnie Driver recalls her past loves, including her relationship with ex-fiancé Josh Brolin.

In a wide-ranging new interview with The Sunday Times — published on Saturday, July 6 — the The unstoppable Will Hunting The actress, 54, said she’s glad she and Brolin, 56, never got married.

Recalling that he was 12 years old and learned that his father, Ronnie Driver, had another wife and family, and that his parents had never been married during their 16-year relationship, Driver revealed to The times that this revelation—which his mother, Gaynor Churchward, told him in “a moment of anger”—distorted his view of relationships in the years that followed.

“If I look at my history, what it did was I wanted to get married so badly and then I chose men who weren’t the right men to marry,” Driver told the outlet. “So I kept yearning to get married and have that conservative version (of a relationship), find men who had no interest in that and then if any of them did, run away.”

While talking about her history of partners who “weren’t the right men to marry,” she mentioned Brolin, whom she met on the set of the 2000 film. Slow combustion.

Reflecting on her 2001 engagement—the only time she was ever engaged—Driver told The times that if the actors had gone to the altar, “it would have been, I think, the biggest mistake of my life.”

Driver and Brolin were engaged for five and a half months and called off their wedding plans in October 2001, ABC News reported at the time.

“Minnie Driver and Josh Brolin have decided to cancel their wedding plans. Their decision is mutual and amicable,” a rep for Driver told the outlet, adding that the couple never set a date.

More than two decades later, Brolin is married to Kathryn Boyd Brolin (they tied the knot in 2016) and Driver has found the right man for her, writer and filmmaker Addison O’Dea told The times.

“But now I’m with someone who doesn’t want to get married but who is the most devoted, loving, extraordinary man… everything I could have ever wanted in my childhood idea of ​​a husband, he truly is,” she said of O’Dea.

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Before Brolin, Driver was linked to another actor, her The unstoppable Will Hunting co-star, Matt Damon. Earlier this year, the She delighted The actress revealed what she would tell her 25-year-old self after their split in 1998.

“I wish I could tell her, ‘Honey, it’s OK, you can celebrate and life is going to be great and beautiful and difficult and amazing,'” Driver said in The Jennifer Hudson Show in March. “’You’re going to love again, everything will be okay.’”