Will Arnett Says He ‘Cried For A Hour’ On The Side Of A Road After Breaking Up With Amy Poehler

For every 20 celebrity couples you couldn’t care less about, there’s that one couple that seems so perfectly matched that you can’t help but find yourself rooting for them—and crushed if their romance doesn’t work out. For many people, Will Arnett and Amy Poehler were that couple. And as Arnett recently told The Guardian, their divorce—following the birth of their second child—marked a very “weird” time for the actor, especially given that the whole world seemed to be grieving their break-up.

“People talk about you like they know you and they talk about your relationship as if they know what’s going on,” Arnett said. “So imagine how weird that is. It’s brutal with any relationship, and we have kids, and without getting into specifics, you then see stuff online, like, this one journalist wrote: ‘I’m Team Amy.’ I’m like: ‘You’re a grown person. What are you talking about This is a breakup. This is a family. This isn’t some game.’”

Arnett and Poehler, who first met in 1996 and began dating in 2000, were often seen guest-starring in each other’s projects. Poehler played the seal-selling wife of Arnett’s Gob Bluth for a few episodes of Arrested Development, while Arnett guest-starred as an MRI tech and date of Poehler’s Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation. The couple married in 2003, announced their separation in 2012, and Arnett filed for divorce in 2014. At the time of their separation, Arnett was shooting season 4 of Arrested Development, which had been revived by Netflix.

While he told The Guardian he was happy to be back in the fold of the series he loved so much, mentally, he described the time as “Just brutal, brutal, brutal. I was driving to the set one day and I pulled over to the side of the road and cried for an hour.”

But something positive did come from the pain: BoJack Horseman. Arnett said that he channeled much of what he was feeling into the animated character, whom he describes as “an amalgamation of characteristics that I didn’t like about other people and other stuff about me that I didn’t like. Yeah, what a weird thing to do. But it was kind of the only thing I knew how to do. It was a painful couple of years, but I had to go through it, I guess.”

Ultimately, Arnett says you just have to “get on with it. It’s been almost 10 years and my kids are so lucky that Amy is their mother and I’m so lucky that we’re such a huge part of each other’s lives, even more so than we were five years ago.”