Ali Wong Reveals 'Hardest' Part About Her Divorce Was Mom's Reaction: 'Can You Just Wait Until I Die?'

Last week, stand-up comedian Ali Wong and her ex-husband, Justin Hakuta, were spotted spending time together in San Francisco. Hakuta was seen still wearing his wedding ring, which created speculation the two could be reconciling. But Wong tells The Hollywood Reporter that the pair just have “a very unconventional divorce.”

For the first time since announcing her divorce last year, the Wong, 40, is opening up about her personal life, career, and starring in the upcoming dark comedy, Beef. 

Wong and Hakuta met at a friend's wedding reception in 2010 when Hakuta was a student at Harvard Business School. They tied the knot four years later.

When Wong covered Health in 2019, she talked about how her fame affected her relationship with the businessman.

"It's definitely weird. I’m very open about the fact that we go to therapy," she said. "We talk a lot about the transitions that we go through as a couple. He is so happy for me, but this lifestyle is not what he expected."

After eight years of marriage, Wong made a surprising confession to The Hollywood Reporter on what the hardest part about her divorce was. 

“I did not expect the 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 f**king hard dealing with all her fear of the shame it would bring her."

In her February 2022 Netflix standup special, Don Wong, Wong said she felt "deep envy" for single people, adding that she thinks about cheating on her husband "every five minutes," and joked that she's "going through a mid-life crisis."

"If you're romantically involved with somebody and then all of the sudden that somebody reveals a personality trait that you don't like, you could just leave, move to another city and never see their stupid face again," she said of non-married people during her routine. "Because you didn't make a promise in front of your grandma and all of your co-workers, and ask your friends to buy you an Instant Pot. You didn't fuse your DNA to create human life that will forever ask you, 'Where's Daddy?'"

Despite the divorce and jokes, Wong and Hakuta remain close. “We’re best friends. We’ve been through so much together. It’s a very unconventional divorce,” Wong tells The Hollywood Reporter.

In June, the former couple will hit the road together for another comedy tour with their two daughters joining them. 

“I’m still workshopping it, but the bones are there and it came to me very fast,” Wong says. “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.”

On April 6, Netflix will premiere A24’s dark comedy series, Beef, in which she stars opposite Oscar nominee Steven Yeun as Amy, a high-achieving working wife and mother whose road-rage encounter pushes her into increasingly destructive territory. Her first dramatic lead, it’s a career milestone and a personal one.

“For me — and I’ll leave it up for interpretation what this means — it was a way to say what I’ve been wanting to say about relationships and being a working mom that I haven’t found a way to talk about onstage,” Wong says.

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