It has been over a year since Aaron Rodgers and Olivia Munn split. They had been together for three years.
Time has passed. Aaron is dating again. And Olivia is opening up about what she knows about his family situation.
"I"ve kind of avoided speaking about him for a long time, but …"
As you"ll hear in the video below, Olivia Munn appeared on the SiriusXM show, Andy Cohen Live.
"I met one brother, the one who was on The Bachelorette. I was friendly with Jordan."
She sounds nervous to be addressing such a touchy subject.
"I met the parents only a couple of times."
Only a couple of times in three years? That … is more or less what we"ve expected, given all that we"ve heard.
"Before he and I started dating he had not spoken to one of the brothers and his parents for eight months."
Wow.
While some rumors suggested that Aaron broke up with Olivia for his family"s sake, she says that, if anything, she encouraged them to be closer.
"My last day on ‘The Newsroom’ I spent my day in the trailer just encouraging him to have an open conversation with his parents."
And she says that it worked.
"And they had a really nice conversation and then they started coming out my first year in Green Bay in 2014."
She talks about how delicate the relationship between fame and the family can be.
"I do believe that family and fame and success can be really complicated if their dreams are connected to your success."
And there"s more than a little overlap between Aaron"s career and his family.
"They [the Rodgers family] are all into sports and Aaron is one of the best, if not the best, quarterbacks to play the game."
I"m not personally sure how to rank a quarterback or any professional athlete, but I"ll take her word for it.
"Their work has a direct connection to what he does."
Aaron"s father played football, as Olivia mentions, and now works as a sports chiropractor.
"There’s a lot of complications."
She doesn"t spill every last detail.
"I don’t think either side of the road is clean."
While she"s not willing to say that either Aaron or his family are free of wrongdoing, she does ultimately pick a side.
"But I do think it’s not OK if you try to stand on someone’s shoulders then throw dirt in their face, that’s what I think."
It sounds like she"s Team Aaron, in the end.
In general, the conversation between Andy and Olivia was about complicated families and what changes when one of them is thrust into the spotlight as a celebrity.
It has been a widespread topic of conversation in recent weeks, given the Royal Wedding and Meghan Markle"s horrifying extended family.
(To be clear, MegMar"s mother is amazing)
Olivia talks about how there"s no real parallel to Aaron"s family troubles within her own family, because their worlds don"t collide.
She talks about her mother being a tiny Asian woman who exists totally outside of the sphere of Olivia"s work.
J.K. Rowling"s husband is a doctor.
Chris Evans" father is a dentist.
A lot of celebrities make it work with their families. But some, inevitably, cannot handle being thrust into the spotlight. It can bring out the worst in people.
it is so sweet to hear that Olivia tried to get Aaron and his family to mend fences.
Obviously, some people"s issues with their parents transcend family feuds; if someone is toxic or abusive, you have every right to cut them off.
it sounds like, in this case, the bad blood arose from a number of complicated factors.
As Aaron"s brother Jordan revealed on The Bachelorette:
"It’s just kind of the way he’s chosen to do life, and I chose to stay close with my family, my parents, and my brother."
That mess sounds too complicated to be fixed by any one person. Olivia included.
Hear her describe all of that and more in this video:
