By Lori Bizzoco and Sarah Ribeiro
When Daphne Wayans got divorced, she didn’t let her broken marriage keep her from finding happiness — or stop her from making a name for herself. The ex of comic Keenen Ivory Wayans will be on the upcoming season of ‘Hollywood Exes’ with an agenda to present herself not as an ex-wife but as a woman. “I’ve been avoiding being in the public eye for a very long time,” Wayans says. “I stopped looking at how I couldn’t do it and started looking at how I could. I’m not very interested in necessarily being famous, but I’m interested in the good that comes out of it.”
While some women may find themselves embittered after a divorce, Wayans isn’t joining the cast of VH1’s hit reality show to get anything off her chest. Instead, she wants to help other divorced mothers like her. “I get told that I have a little bit of a different viewpoint in life. I tend to try not to look at the minutia of things. I try to take a big step back and have a bird’s eye view of the scene.”
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Because of that, she says, ‘Hollywood Exes’ gives divorced women a new perspective on how to deal with their divorce. A pivotal moment that brought Wayans on camera happened during last season of ‘Exes’: “I was watching one of the interviews on the show, and they focused on the friendship that was left there after the divorce — not what wasn’t there or what was destroyed.”
That friendship, she says, is the outlook that kept her relationship with Keenen strong after things ended — and the reason she is on board for this upcoming season.
Wayans explains, “That’s the kind of thing we expressed during the pitch for the show. Originally, I got cold feet, and I couldn’t go on the first season. But in the end, I was really proud of the women — there was no ex-husband bashing.”
This, she says, is why her divorce worked out for the better: “It was hard and heartbreaking, but I kept the picture of our friendship in the back of my mind. I just started caring for him as a person, as someone I wanted to care for, and we got back to that point where we cared about each other again.”
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Her positive view on a split is what Wayans hopes to bring to ‘Hollywood Exes,’ and she hopes viewers can take that and apply it to themselves. “The biggest thing that I’ve learned is — particularly when you’ve had children — you’re still a family. Keenen and I may not be a married couple anymore, but we’re tied together by these five children. That’s what’s left when the smoke clears. Through all the fighting and dismantling of the marriage, you’re still left with a family. You need to figure out what you couldn’t when you were married: how to get along.”
Tune into the upcoming season of ‘Hollywood Exes,’ scheduled to premiere this spring, on VH1 to keep up with Daphne Wayans. You can also follow her on Twitter at @DaphneWayans.
