John Mulaney appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers this past September to discuss what had been an eventful year, culminating with the announcement that he and girlfriend Olivia Munn were expecting their first child together.
Mulaney started by mentioning his short-lived trip to rehab in September, bypassing the fact that he filed for divorce from Anne Marie Tendler, his wife of seven years, that same year.
Mulaney spent nearly four months in rehab and sober living before he started dating Munn, whom he first met at Meyers’ wedding in 2013, “in the spring.” Shortly thereafter, the two were having a baby, a departure from Mulaney’s previous stance against having kids. “They’re great, but I love what I do,” he toldEntertainment Tonight in 2019 about the prospect of being a father. “And I love my wife and spending so much time with her and we have a really fortunate life. I get to travel, do stand-up, and our relationship is so wonderful. It’s just something I wouldn’t want to change.”
In a profile for Harper’s Bazaar, Tendler said she now plans on freezing her eggs, explaining she “always held partnership above having kids,” which may have influenced her and Mulaney’s no-baby policy. “There were things I never even thought about before because that was just a closed door,” she said. “So now that it feels like not as much of a closed door, it’s something that I ruminate on a lot.”
As Mulaney publicly exalted Munn and their first child together because they “helped save me from myself on this early journey out of recovery,” you can’t help but wonder how Tendler was taking this news. “Everything that has transpired has been totally shocking and I think surreal,” she said. “In a way, I feel like, well, it can only go up from here, because I reached the depth of where I could go.”
After everything she has gone through with her personal life last year, Tendler is approaching 2022 as an opportunity for a new beginning. “I feel lucky that I get to be standing on the precipice of all of these new things, that I get to possibly experience, and who knows how they will go?” she said. “And there is certainly something exciting about that.”
Head over to Harper’s Bazaar to read the interview in full.
