Minnie Driver Says Marrying Josh Brolin Would Have Been “the Biggest Mistake of My Life”

Sometimes to answer a current question, you have to look to the past. In a new interview with U.K.’s The Times, published Saturday, actor Minnie Driver revealed that thinking about her parents’ relationship has given her new perspective on her own love life, including her brief past engagement to fellow actor Josh Brolin.

“The one time I was engaged it would have been, I think, the biggest mistake of my life,” she said, not mentioning Brolin by name. The two met on the set of 1998’s Slow Burn and got engaged in April 2001, then called it off in October 2001 having never set a wedding date. According to the BBC at the time, the split was “amicable and mutual.”

In the new interview, Driver reflected on her childhood and finding out at age 12 that her father, Ronnie Driver, was married to another woman and had another family with her, despite his 16-year relationship with Minnie’s mother, Gaynor Churchward. When Minnie was 6, Gaynor left him, and his double life was revealed later to tween Minnie during an argument.

Her parents’ relationship impacted her own future romantic life, she 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,” she said. “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 didn’t go into detail about why following through on her previous engagement to Brolin would have been a mistake, but spoke highly of her current beau, American writer and director Addison O’Dea, to whom she has been linked for about six years.

“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,” she said.

Driver is mother to a 15-year-old son, Henry, from a brief past relationship. When she became pregnant, she pivoted and focused on TV roles that would let her spend time at home with him.

“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 said.

Representatives for Josh Brolin did not immediately return Vanity Fair’s request for comment.