Actor Taye Diggs’ ex-wife, Idina Menzel is opening up about the downfall of their marriage. In a conversation with Jesse Tyler Ferguson on his Dinner’s on Me podcast, she shared her opinion on the major cause of its failure. She says that her relationship with Diggs ultimately failed due it it being an interracial one.
After meeting on the set of the 1996 Broadway hit Rent, the couple began dating and got married in 2003. After a decade, the two divorced in 2014.
Digging into the Marriage of Taye Diggs and Idina Menzel
Ferguson asked how both of them rising to fame as actors affected their relationship.
“It’s very complicated,” she said when asked about how their individual rises to fame affected the relationship. She said they were “very supportive of each other always, so excited for him. The thing that came into play more and he’s talked about it too is the interracial aspect.”
She said that her relationship with Diggs while in the theater world put them in a bubble. Many people in that environment were supportive of their interracial relationship, but once they stepped further into fame, things changed.
“He’s on the cover of Essence and Ebony and being interviewed by all these Black journalists and I think he had his own stuff to deal with that,” she said of Diggs. “And it seemed like there was disappointment in the community with him because he was married to [a] white, Jewish girl from some show we don’t even remember, and so, I took that on too. That’s stuff that we had to deal with. It was less about being successful and more about that kind of stuff.”
Taye Diggs has gone on to star in the successful series, All American, and has since opened up his love life. Currently, he is dating former Love and Hip Hop: Hollywood cast member Apryl Jones. Menzel married her current husband, Aaron Lohr, in 2017.