Rob Delaney has admitted that he is “sexist”, although he does not “want to be”.
The Catastrophe star, 46, was discussing how people can “work with” their internalised sexism and suggested that by acknowledging it, they could try to “be less of [a sexist]”.
Asked how he and his wife, Leah Delaney, have reached their 17th wedding anniversary milestone, the actor encouraged people not to adhere to the old adage: “You can’t teach a dog new tricks.”
“Do learn new tricks,” he said in a new interview with the Observer. “From a sexist point of view – because I am sexist, I don’t want to be but if you admit it and work with it then you can be less of one – I thought that women just said things because they had to hit a certain word quota each day.
“It took me years to learn that when women say something, they actually mean it. So that’s me, an old dog going in a new direction.”
Delaney also offered another bit of sage marriage advice for fans. “Another little saying that i find useful is you can only coast downhill. Sorry everybody, but it takes work. All the time.”
He previously said that, from his marriage, he and Leah have learned “the humility required to nurture love and a close relationship.
Last year, Delaney opened up about the death of his and Leah’s son Henry at the age of two in 2018.
Henry died following two years of treatment for a brain tumour.
Speaking to Marc Maron on the comedian’s WTF podcast, Delaney reflected on how most people don’t know what to say someone who is grieving, adding that he was surprised when he realised that people had “no real emotional sense of how to deal” with grief.
Rob Delaney— (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Amazon Studios)
“It’s not everybody,” he said, before referring to Maron’s own grief. The podcast host lost his girlfriend Lynn Shelton in 2020 to acute myeloid leukaemia.
“As you may have experienced yourself, you can be surprised by some people stepping up beautifully. And then other people who you think would have been there f*** off and do a terrible job.”
He added: “A lot of people were wonderful [...] but then some people are afraid of you. As they say, losing a child is people who have children’s greatest fear and so I think people were afraid of us.
“That’s my stab at it... is that they were afraid of us. That they might catch dead kid from us. Or they’d have to imagine, you know.”
Delaney published his memoir, A Heart That Works, last year. The book captured what his family endured during Henry’s treatment and what happened following his death.
He told the Guardian that writing the book “felt like a healthy process”, but he did not find it cathartic and found the promotion of the book “excruciating”.
“There were people blowing smoke up my rear end, treating me like some kind of grief expert,” he said. “I almost began to wonder, am I going to graduate a few levels of grief just because I wrote a book? The answer to that is certainly not.”
Delaney and Leah live in London with their three sons.
