It's not all just laughs for Will Arnett.
Though the Arrested Development actor is a master at bringing out the humor onscreen, his divorce from co-star Amy Poehler brought him to tears, Arnett said in an interview with The Guardian published on Tuesday, Feb. 8.
The couple got married in 2003, the same year Arrested Development began on Fox. In 2012, they announced they were calling it off, later finalizing their divorce in 2016. Making it all the more strange, he later reprised his role of Gob Bluth on Arrested Development for Netflix from 2013 to 2019.
Arnett recalled that the situation was "almost excruciating … Just brutal, brutal, brutal." While driving to set to film season four of the comedy show in 2013, he said he "pulled over to the side of the road and cried for an hour" amid his divorce.
Pushing through the tears, he still went to work on Arrested Development, relying on people like the creator and director Michael Hurwitz to make the experience "hilarious and cathartic."
He described the time of his divorce as the "weird years" and is now looking past the days of roadside tears.
Arnett remarked, "It is crazy to me how much my whole life has shifted in five years in such a dramatic way. Isn't that wild?"
During this marriage to Poehler, they welcomed two sons: Archie, 13, and Abel, 11.
"Yeah, you get on with it," he said. "It's been almost 10 years and my kids are so lucky that Amy is their mother and I'm so lucky that we're such a huge part of each other's lives, even more so than we were five years ago."
The 52-year-old actor is now a new father after welcoming Alexander, known as Denny, 1, with his girlfriend Alessandra Brawn during the pandemic, he told The Guardian. Balancing fatherhood between his two older children and a newborn made him realize: "Oh my god. I'm in this for A WHILE," he said in the interview.
Ultimately, Arnett thinks divorce can be more emotionally difficult when the relationship is in the public eye. As he recalled, "This one journalist wrote: ‘I'm Team Amy.' I'm like: ‘You're a grown person. What are you talking about? This is a breakup. This is a family. This isn't some game.'"
For her part, Poehler has said that the breakup was "too sad" and "too personal" to discuss in detail, according to an excerpt of her memoir obtained by Hello! magazine in 2014.
She wrote at the time, "When you are a person going through a divorce you feel incredibly alone, yet you are constantly reminded by society of how frequently divorce happens and how common it has become. You aren't allowed to feel special, but no one knows the specific ways you are in pain."