Malin Åkerman is shedding light on her divorce from ex-husband Roberto Zincone, sharing why they split and how she bounced back.
“It wasn’t how we planned it,” Åkerman, 48, said on the Wednesday, November 11, episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast of the exes’ road to parenthood. “A child changes you. It changes the dynamics in your relationships. It takes a really strong relationship to keep that together, and we just didn’t have that.”
The Hunting Wives star met Zincone when she was in her 20s and they were part of a band. Zincone barely spoke any English, having come from Italy, while Åkerman spoke English and Swedish with some French.
Despite the language barrier, the pair tied the knot in 2007 and welcomed their son, Sebastian, in 2013.
“We were young. We met in our 20s. It was the whirlwind love story,” Åkerman recalled, confessing that after their son was born, they realized “we were not communicating.”
The 27 Dresses actress explained, “We hadn’t talked about parenting. We hadn’t talked about what our schedules might look like. We were so naive stepping into this.”
Åkerman and Zicone split in November 2013, just seven months after she gave birth, acknowledging, “This doesn’t work with us as parents together.”
Looking back at that tumultuous time, Åkerman said, “It was a lot” because not only was she going through a divorce, but she had just become a mother.
“Was it hard? Yeah. To be going through a divorce, I just started back at work. I was now bringing my son with me to work,” she remembered. “Luckily, I was producing on the show that I was starring in, so my office space turned into a nursery.”
Åkerman noted, “It’s like, the beauty is I got to have him with me every day. It was lovely.”
However, the highs also came with many lows as she navigated becoming a single parent basically overnight.
“But it was really hard to be mourning the end of a relationship, doing a comedy, stepping into motherhood, being up all night feeding him, you know, and then going to work,” Åkerman confessed.
The Comeback alum told podcast host Alex Cooper that luckily her best friend moved in with her and Sebastian just two months after her split.
“It was the best experience we’ve ever had,” she said of the living arrangement that lasted about a year.
Åkerman explained that it was during that time that she started her “dance parties” that helped her find her way back to her true self.
“Every Sunday I have a neon sign and it says Sebi Sunday,” she shared. “And it became Sebi Sundays because every Sunday I’d invite all the parents, all my friends and non-parents come over, hang by the pool, pop the rosé, kids are roaming around, this is great.”
The model said after the kids went to bed, the music and disco ball came out and the adults danced all night.
“[We would] dance our troubles away. It was the best, most cathartic [experience],” Åkerman continued. “It was like celebrating the good things in life. Seeing the community that I had versus seeing the losses. It was a lot.”
Åkerman reveled in that bliss for about two years before she had what she called “a year of reckoning” where she began transcendental meditation and therapy.
“I started doing some deep, deep therapy on figuring out who I was, what my intimacy issues were, why I was keeping people at arm’s length, how to kind of navigate that,” she revealed. “And just shifting and seeing who I am now in my 30s as a mother, a single mother in the world and what does that mean to me. So it took some time to figure that out.”
Åkerman has since remarried, tying the knot with Jack Donnelly in 2018.
Her relationship with her ex-husband is also better, with the actress confirming they are “still friends” who recently went to Italy together.
