Trading clouds for sunshine. Mandy Moore opened up about a not-so-happy time in her marriage to Ryan Adams.
“When I think back to that particular time period that we’re talking about … It was heavy. It was dark. It was confusing. It was lonely,” the This Is Us star, 34, told Bustle in an interview published on Thursday, November 8. “There was no room for me. There was no room for me to have anything else in my life.”
Moore turned to work as a result. “I put all the emphasis and pressure on, well, I can just dig myself out of this hole by finding fulfillment from a career perspective,” she explained.
However, a series of professional setbacks proved the distraction would not be enough to make her happier. “I exhausted every effort before I was like, ‘OK, well, that has to be addressed,’” she said. “Those monumental shifts in your life … they come at a big cost. It wasn’t a decision that I made flippantly.” The “Candy” singer filed for divorce from Adams, 44, in January 2015 after six years of marriage.
Luckily, the change was good for her in the end. “It’s no coincidence to me that once I did that hard work, life opened up in a way that I never could have expected,” Moore noted. “Once I did that, it was like, the sun came back out again. In every respect I felt like, ‘Oh, now I’m living the life that I’m supposed to be living.’”
The A Walk to Remember actress landed her iconic role on This Is Us and started dating her now-fiancé, Taylor Goldsmith, shortly thereafter. She told Us Weekly exclusively in September that she was “a little bit” in wedding mode.
Still, Moore became emotional when talking about her return to music, pointing out that she “allowed other people to make [her] feel bad” about wanting to pick it back up. “We do ourselves such a disservice. And I think, not to make a generalization, but I think it often afflicts women more than men, where we make ourselves feel so small to make other people comfortable,” she said. “I think I did that for so long because I was scared of ruffling feathers. I just didn’t want to cause trouble. I felt like somebody else was more important. Somebody else’s choices or time, or whatever, should come before me.”
The Princess Diaries star previously spoke out about feeling “spiritually and fundamentally stuck” in her first marriage. “I didn’t choose the right person,” she said in an October profile for Glamour. “I don’t feel guilty for [the divorce]. I don’t fault myself for it. When people said, ‘I’m sorry,’ I was like, ‘No. Sorry would have been had I stayed in a very unhealthy situation.’ I didn’t. I found my way out. And when I did, things opened back up again.”
The “Do You Still Love Me?” singer hit back at his ex-wife on Twitter at the time, calling the romance “doomed from the start.” He later apologized for his comments. “I was trying to be funny,” he tweeted. “But I have and will always choose to remember the amazing moments.”
