Alice Evans broke down in tears as she discussed her divorce from Ioan Gruffudd on Thursday’s “Lorraine”.
Evans, who shares Ella, 12, and Elsie, 8, with Gruffudd, publicly called out her ex on social media earlier this year, claiming he left them out of the blue.
As host Lorraine Kelly questioned an emotional Evans on when she knew that it was over, she explained how it was when he returned to the family home in Los Angeles after filming his show “Harrow” in Australia.
“He came in and hugged the kids, then very dryly gave me a kiss on the cheek and that was how I knew something was very wrong,” she recalled.
“We’d been together 20 years. I was one of those very complacent — what’s the ‘Bridget Jones’ phrase? Smug married. And I think these are things like, just with other things, one can go through like loss of a parent or infertility, you don’t know what it’s like until it happens to you,” she added.
“I thought it was never going to happen to me. He told me within the first few days — ‘I just don’t love you anymore,'” Evans continued.
“And look, I’m not questioning his right to feel that — I’m not bashing him — but it was so out of the blue and then for about four months we just continued here and he just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t feel the same way for you anymore. I might leave, I might not leave. And I eventually got to the point where I’d been on my own for the whole pandemic with my two kids. I’ve looked after them for 10 years when he’s mostly filmed for the past 10 years, outside of Los Angeles. So I was here and he was here but he wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t look at me, went to sleep in the spare room,” she said, adding, “Eventually, I thought I might do myself harm.”
She shared, “I spoke to my friends and they kept saying, ‘This is not like him, this just doesn’t sound right.’ I think I bored [them] and my friends just didn’t know what to say to me, and at one point I just thought, ‘I am going to lose my mind.’ And I just tweeted, ‘He’s leaving us’ And then all hell broke loose…” Evans added.
Gruffudd and Evans met while filming the movie “102 Dalmatians”, tying the knot in 2007.
READ MORE: Ioan Gruffudd’s Wife Alice Evans Says She ‘Weeps All Day’ After His Decision To ‘Leave His Family’
The actress has spoken openly about the split on social media, with some criticizing her for doing so.
Evans said of public reaction, “His reaction wasn’t good. Initially, I think nobody had ever really done this before and I would say the reaction was about 50:50. You know, there were a lot of people who were angry with me and almost didn’t believe me, which is kind of weird when you think about it because it’s a pretty strange thing to make up if I’m going to be 20 years with someone and then make up some idea that he’s left me, he’s leaving us, when he hadn’t,” she said.
“A lot of people were shocked and there was so much talk of a dignified silence. And I’m going to do this [makes quotation marks with her fingers], because I don’t understand how you can talk about a dignified silence when I’m talking about my entire life falling to pieces around me. I think people use that phrase a lot but as time went on, because I did stop tweeting — because I was told legally not to — and then I went back to it,” she added. “It’s sort of, kind of a messy story, but I think as people understood what had happened, I would say support is now about 80 or 90 [per cent] in favour of me. Not in favour of me against him, but in favour of me speaking out and understanding why I’m doing it.”
Gruffudd has since announced his new relationship with Bianca Wallace, sharing a snap of the pair in October.
Evans was in tears as she explained to Kelly that the pair no longer communicate.
“He’ll only talk to me through lawyers,” she said. “Even if I lean in to the phone when he sometimes rarely talks to the children on FaceTime, he’ll move away and call the lawyers. I don’t know why.”
Evans added of Gruffudd’s new romance, “It’s very bizarre because as a lot of people know, he insisted, I think I’m OK to say this, he insisted until two weeks ago that there was nobody else. My phone pinged and said [he] has unblocked you on Instagram. I thought maybe he wants to talk. It was announced by him and his mistress that they were a couple on Instagram two weeks ago. I looked at the picture and it said something like ‘finally somebody who can make me happy.’ People from his set in Australia [were] saying ‘so glad you guys are finally out and you’re happy.’ I was slayed. This is my husband,” she said.
“I think I was owed more than an Instagram after 20 years of marriage and two children,” she concluded. “I feel like a bit of an idiot as well. I’m pretty sure this has been going on for quite a while. It’s not somebody he’s just met now.”
