Actor Aaron Ashmore revealed he quietly ended his marriage to wife Zoë Kate after nearly a decade of marriage.
During the “Inside of You” podcast episode on Tuesday, March 25, actor Aaron Ashmore, aged 45, spoke to host Michael Rosenbaum about the most challenging period in his life.
Ashmore shared that dealing with COVID was extremely difficult for him. At the time, he and his wife had a new baby, while his father was left at home looking after a 3-year-old and the newborn. Ashmore’s father fell ill during this period and later passed away. To add to the distress, eight months after his father’s death, Ashmore and his wife made the decision to separate. This sequence of events brought about a period of about two and a half years filled with grief from losing his father and the breakdown of his marriage.
Reflecting on this tumultuous time, Ashmore expressed how it felt like a continuous stream of challenges hitting him. Rosenbaum inquired whether Ashmore and his wife sought therapy before ending their marriage. Ashmore revealed that they had actually been attending therapy together for some time to work on their relationship. Notably, his ex-wife is a therapist, which contributed to the encouragement for them to engage in therapy sessions.
While reflecting on his and Kate’s romance, Ashmore noted that they “did our due diligence” before their breakup, adding, “We were probably in therapy for a year before we ended up deciding that it just wasn’t going to work. I did some therapy afterwards. There were some difficult times.”
Ashmore is in a better place now but previously faced setbacks.
“A year and a half ago, we had to sell the house. The house that I loved where one of my kids was born. I just couldn’t afford to keep it, and that sent me into a tailspin for a good three or four months,” Ashmore, who shares two kids with Kate, continued. “I was depressed. It’s a weird thing because it’s just a house, and I’m going to be able to go buy another house. But it just represented something. It was the last thing of our marriage — the true end of it.”
He added: “This is finite. There’s nothing left of [relationship]. The kids of course but [in terms of] our life together. That really spun me out for a good two or three months. I was just really struggling.”
Aaron credited his twin brother and fellow actor Shawn Ashmore for his support.
“Luckily, my brother came and helped me out. He was like, ‘Dude, you’re in a rough patch.’ But sometimes those things hit you not when you’re expecting it,” he admitted. “It finally catches up with you, and you don’t know what to do about it. You’re so overwhelmed that you’re like, ‘Why do I feel like this? I can’t get out of this.’”
The most surprising moments hit Aaron when he was least expecting it. “This happened a year and a half ago — or two years ago — the big difficult thing. So why am I feeling like this now?” he continued. “It’s hard to understand how the mind works and why things happen at the timing that they do. I was just crying in the grocery store for no reason.”
