Publish date: 2023-12-14

Though Ali Wong‘s marriage to Justin Hakuta is over, that doesn’t mean their love is gone. Ali, 40, and Justin, 40, announced their uncoupling in April 2022, but ahead of her new Netflix/A24 comedy series Beef and her upcoming summer tour, Ali told The Hollywood Reporter that she and her ex-husband are still “really, really close; we’re best friends. We’ve been through so much together. It’s a very unconventional divorce.”

Ali said that she and Justin played pickleball the morning before she spoke with THR and that Justin – a successful tech entrepreneur – would travel with Ali and their daughters when she goes on the road this June. Ali was famously pregnant with Mari Hakuta (b. 2015) for her Baby Cobra special and pregnant with Nikki Hakuta (b. 2017) in Hard Knock Wife. In Ali’s 2022 special, Don Wong, Ali discussed her struggles with monogamy, referring to it as a “jail and I don’t know how to get out.”

Ali will debut material about her post-divorce dating habits. “I’m still workshopping it,” she told THR, “but the bones are there, and it came to me very fast. This is the first hour I’m doing since I started, where I’m single. I think we’re going to call it the Single Lady tour.”

“I did not expect the [divorce] announcement to be so widespread, but by far the hardest part about getting divorced was my mother’s reaction,” she says. “I had told her before that I thought we might get divorced, and she was really upset. She looked me in the eye and asked, ‘Can you just wait until I die?’ She was literally asking me to not live a life for myself. But she’s 82, what do I expect? She hasn’t had her period in 40 years. She’s in the sha-ha-hallows of senior citizenship. But it was still really fucking hard dealing with all her fear of the shame it would bring her.”

Ali noted that there was a silver-lining to her divorce announcement getting so much press. Her mother “didn’t have to tell any of her friends. All of them found out because it made it to a bunch of the Chinese and Vietnamese newspapers — I still can’t believe why on earth they would be interested in me,” Ali told THR, “and they all called her. She died a million deaths in one day and then woke up the next day and was like, ‘I survived. She still sees Justin a ton.'”

“All of this — my stand-up, Beef, Always Be My Maybe, how I am with my friends, how they relay a conversation I had with them — is never going to be the whole truth,” adds Ali. “It is always going to be an abstraction of truth, and I think that’s very comforting. I can’t help what people expect. I don’t try to control what they think or take away at all. That’s not the goal. The goal is to surprise them and make them laugh and make myself laugh and have fun.”

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