Ali Wong has said that her ex-husband Justin Hakuta remains her “best friend” even after their divorce last year.
The stand-up comic, who rose to fame after her first Netflix special Baby Cobra, separated from Hakuta after eight years of marriage in April 2022.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, published on Wednesday (1 March), Wong said: “We’re really, really close; we’re best friends. We’ve been through so much together. It’s a very unconventional divorce.”
The pair continue to co-parent their two daughters, Mari and Nikki Hakuta. Wong also revealed that Hakuta and their daughters will travel with her when she goes back on tour this summer.
However, the “hardest part” about getting a divorce was her mother’s reaction and “fear of the shame” that Wong’s divorce might bring to their family.
“I had told her before that I thought we might get divorced and she was really upset,” the Always Be My Maybe star recalled. “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 f***ing hard dealing with all her fear of the shame it would bring her.”
But Wong said after the announcement became widely reported in Chinese and Vietnamese newspapers, her mother did not have to tell her friends personally as they found out through the media.
“She died a million deaths in one day and then woke up the next day and was like, ‘I survived’,” Wong added. “She still sees Justin a ton.”
Wong and Hakuta first met in 2010 and married in San Francisco on 27 November 2014.
In 2019, she opened up about her wedding during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and joked: “I got married at City Hall because I didn’t want to have a formal wedding because I’m a stand-up comic and I was like, ‘I don’t want to walk down the aisle for 60 seconds while people stare at me in silence’. That would give me PTSD.”
The comedian’s representative confirmed the separation last April, with a source adding at the time: “It’s amicable and they will continue to co-parent lovingly.”
