Minnie Driver says marrying Marvel star would have been ‘biggest mistake’ of her life

The ‘Good Will Hunting’ actor said she ‘would carry on longing to be married, find men who had no interest in that, and then if one did, run a mile’

Minnie Driver has said that it would have been “the biggest mistake” of her life to marry the Marvel actor Josh Brolin.

The actor and musician – who is best known for her roles in Good Will Hunting and Grosse Pointe Blank – revealed in her 2022 memoir Managing Expectations that she discovered at the age of 12 that her parents had never married as her father was already married to a different woman, and had a second family.

In a new interview, the Return to Me star discussed how her father’s double life impacted her own relationships with men.

“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 told The Sunday 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.”

She continued: “The one time I was engaged it would have been, I think, the biggest mistake of my life.”

Driver was referencing her engagement to Brolin, who she met on the set of the 2000 thriller Slow Burn. The pair were engaged in 2001 but announced their split five months later. Brolin, who played Thanos in the MCU and has appeared in films including No Country for Old Men and Dune, would go on to wed the actor Diane Lane and subsequently the model Kathryn Boyd. He is also the son of the actor James Brolin and stepson of Barbra Streisand.

The actors Minnie Driver and Josh Brolin, who were formerly engaged (Getty Images)

In her new interview, Driver added that she is now in a relationship with a man – the writer and director Addison O’Dea – who, like her, has no interest in marriage.

“Now I’m with someone who doesn’t want to get married but who is the most devoted, loving, extraordinary…” she said. “Everything I could have wanted in my childhood idea of a husband, he actually is.”

Earlier this year, Driver – who was formerly in a relationship with her Good Will Hunting co-star Matt Damon – said that she would advice her younger self to “not date actors”.

Separately this year, the actor revealed that the producers of her 1998 action thriller Hard Rain refused to let her swim in a wetsuit on-camera so that her nipples were visible.