It’s unfortunately not all that rare for marriages to end, and celebrity divorces seem to be especially common. But no matter how famous you are or whatever the reasons are for the split, there’s no getting around the awkwardness of having to spread the news. Oftentimes it seems to be the parents who take it the hardest, and that was certainly the case for Ali Wong, who shared her mother’s wild reaction to learning her marriage was ending. Kelly Clarkson, meanwhile, revealed that her mom had strong feelings as well about her and Brandon Blackstock’s divorce.
Ali Wong visited The Kelly Clarkson Show, where she discussed her split from Justin Hakuta. The couple were married for eight years before separating in 2022, and she filed for divorce in December 2023. Telling her mother of their decision to make the breakup official sounds like a pretty difficult conversation, as Wong recalled:
I told her before we did it, I was like, ‘I think we’re gonna get divorced,’ and then she was really quiet. Oh, no no! That’s not true, she was not quiet. She went back and forth with me about it for a while and then I thought we had resolved it, and then four hours later she was like, ‘Come here.’ And she pulled me to the kitchen and she took my arm, and she was like, ‘Can you just wait until I die?’
I — like Kelly Clarkson’s audience — couldn’t help but laugh at Ali Wong’s re-enactment of that mother-daughter kitchen scene, but the comedian/actress made sure to clarify that it was no laughing matter to her mom.
The request to wait until she was dead was serious, due to the stigma that divorce has carried in the past. Ali Wong said her mother simply thought it would be too embarrassing to admit her daughter’s marriage had failed.
Kelly Clarkson, however, had quite a different experience with her own mother. She explained that her mom is “very religious” and also of a generation that looked down on divorce, but in the case of Brandon Blackstock, the talk show host said:
She could see I was drowning. So yeah, she would have bought the plane tickets.
After hearing of Ali Wong’s experience telling her mother, I can understand why the Beef star was so shocked over Kelly Clarkson’s mom’s support.
The American Idol champion is in a good place post-divorce since moving to New York, but it was a long and painful road before Kelly Clarkson and Brandon Blackstock finally reached a settlement. The divorce proceedings were full of contention surrounding custody of their two children, financial support and division of property.
Ali Wong and Justin Hakuta also share two children, but it seems their split was more amicable, and Wong even shouted out her ex during her Golden Globes speech earlier this year, after kissing current beau Bill Hader just moments before.
Check your local listings to see when The Kelly Clarkson Show airs on the 2024 TV schedule, and you can find Ali Wong in several stand-up specials and the award-winning series Beef, all of which can be streamed with a Netflix subscription.