NBCWe've come a long way since Nicole Kidman cracked that she could finally wear heels after splitting from Tom Cruise and that was the end of it.
It seems as though more and more celebs are sharing, sometimes years after the fact, just how much of a bummer being married to their previous spouse was—or at least got to be in the end. Not that it was the spouse's fault, but rather...they weren't feeling like the best possible versions of themselves at the time.
The consciously uncoupled Chris Martin is the latest to open up about what turned out to be the waning days of his marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow, his revelation coming a couple weeks after a trailer for the new Russell Brand documentary featured the comedian saying, "I'm living this life of the very thing I detest...vapid, vacuous celebrity," as the scene cut to a shot of him and ex Katy Perry. He adds in an interview included in the film, "This is my suspicion, that at some point, to be happy, I'm going to have to walk away."
He and Perry divorced, what, three years ago? And men accuse women of never letting anything go.
David Justice, who was married to Halle Berry for four years in the '90s, popped up out of the woodwork last week to dredge up his hard feelings about the oft-spread rumors that he abused her (Berry has talked about suffering abuse at the hands of a partner but never said it was Justice) and the fact that the actress never officially shot them down. Berry's other ex-husband, Eric Benét, even tweeted his support. Justice ultimately backtracked, tweeting that, despite the tone of his rant, his intent "was not to bash Halle."
Other than that, he doesn't "care what's going on with her affairs," the retired baseball star just told People in an interview that delved into what he felt went wrong with his career as a result of his marriage drama at the time. (He's been married to his second wife for 14 years and they have three kids together.)
But despite the seemingly self-serving nature of injecting himself into the conversation just as Berry's marriage to Olivier Martinez was ending, at least Justice wanted to clear his name. No one has been writing stories accusing Chris Martin of being low on life in 2012.
"A few years ago I was in a low place in my life and was feeling kind of down and confused," the Coldplay frontman just said on Australian radio station 2DayFM's Rove & Sam. A poem called "The Guest House" from the collection Man's Search for Meaning "started me off on this whole journey that's ended up a few years later now where I just feel so happy to be alive...That may sound a little simple but I suddenly feel very grateful for all these things in my life."
Unless his sense of time is off (not that we would blame him for that... What day is it again?), he and Gwyneth announced their separation in March 2014, so "a few years ago" would place him directly in still-married land.
And while he didn't pointedly blame his ex-wife for his malaise in any way, Martin's frontman's lament about what sounds like a pretty checked-out state of being couldn't help but remind us of Brad Pitt's harsh remembrance about what he felt like while he was still married to Jennifer Aniston.
In 2011, six years after he and Aniston split up, Pitt recalled to Parade, It became very clear to me that I was intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life, but I wasn't living an interesting life myself. I think that my marriage had something to do with it, trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn't."
And then he wondered why some readers may have taken that a certain way!
His comments were widely perceived to be a cheap shot at Aniston, who started dating her now-husband Justin Theroux in 2011; and though Pitt said it "grieved him" that people thought he was blaming anyone other than himself for how he was living life at the time, did he think that bringing up his marriage was going to help people distance the two?
Of course all of these famous types were asked about their previous relationships and how they feel now compared to then (Nicole Kidman, to bring it full circle, was just asked last month about her "difficult" days right after divorcing Cruise...14 years ago), but it always stings a little when the guys break out the woe-was-me bit long after the fact.
While they're just talking—and often it's others who connect the dots, fill in the blanks, paint the picture, remove the context, etc.—these guys can't be surprised when it sounds to listeners/readers/viewers as if they're calling foul on their marriage or their ex rather than on themselves.
But we do hope they keep the revelations coming. A glimpse into the mind of the married-then-single-then-perhaps-married-or-dating-again celebrity never ceases to fascinate.