Idina Menzel is single and ready to mingle — if only she had the time. The Frozen performer, who split from husband Taye Diggs in December after 10 years of marriage, told Redbook in a new interview that she’d happily wade back into the dating pool if she weren’t already stretched so thin between her eight-shows-a-week commitment to the Broadway musical If/Then, and her life as a mom to son Walker, 5.
“I’m open to it. I just don’t have a lot of time,” Menzel, 43, told the mag’s December/January issue, for which she is the cover star. “They’d have to meet me at, like, midnight after the show, and that’s kind of slutty, isn’t it?”
Besides that, what little time she does have, she reserves for Walker, whom she and Diggs welcomed in September 2009. Speaking about her life as a newly single mother, Menzel told Redbook she sometimes struggles to find a balance between career and family.
“The guilt is the thing that we as women all feel, whether we stay at home or we work,” she admitted. “There are a lot of double standards with the way the men in our lives see how we make those choices. I think there’s an accounting for how much time I spend with my son, and men don’t have to account for how much time they spend with their child. It hurts to feel that’s a judgment being made. Because we’re already judging ourselves.”
That said, Menzel’s professional life is going swimmingly these days. And she credits at least part of that to John Travolta, who famously flubbed her name — Adele Dazeem, anyone? — during his introduction at the 2014 Academy Awards, where she performed the Oscar-winning song “Let It Go,” from Disney’s Frozen.
“It’s the best mistake that’s ever happened to me,” the Rent star told Redbook. “Just having the kind of success where people might know my name — my real name! It took me a long time to stop chasing it and just embrace it.”
Menzel’s latest project is Holiday Wishes, an album of both original songs and Christmas classics, including “Baby It’s Cold Outside” (a duet with Michael Buble), “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” and “White Christmas.”
“To be honest, my love for Christmas came when I started dating Taye,” the actress, who is Jewish, explained to the mag. “One of my fondest memories of our relationship was how we celebrated Christmas. He has a big family, so we would reserve Christmas Eve for ourselves. I wanted to be the good shiksa girlfriend.”
For access to all our exclusive celebrity videos and interviews – Subscribe on YouTube!
