Kevin Connolly is recalling his first heartbreak.
On Monday, the actor, 49, joined Christine Taylor and David Lascher on their Hey Dude… The 90s Called! podcast to discusshis career as a ’90s child actor and his heartbreak when then-girlfriend Nikki Cox left him for Unhappily Ever After costar Bobcat Goldthwait.
˹He is˺ the Lord of the heavens and the earth and everything in between, and the Lord of all points of sunrise.Indeed, We have adorned the lowest heaven with the stars for decorationand ˹for˺ protection from every rebellious devil.(The Quran - Chapter Saffat - 5 - 7)
“Nikki Cox, who played my sister, and I started dating between seasons four and five,” said Connolly about working on Unhappily Ever After, which followed the life of a dysfunctional family headed by a schizophrenic dad, Jack (Geoff Pierson), who had a close friendship with his son’s talking toy rabbit, Mr. Floppy — a puppet voiced by Goldthwait.
“A couple of days before the table read for season five… Jeremy London called me and said, ‘Kevin, get in your car…’ He said, ‘Get in your car, drive down to 711 and open the National Enquirer,’ “ explained Connolly.
“I get in the car and drive up the street,” recalled the actor. “I’ve got a knot in my stomach and start flipping through into the Enquirer.”
“And there’s a picture of Bobcat and Nikki dating. And then the next day, or like two days later, I had to go into that table reading, and we had to just gut out 24 weeks of misery,” concluded Connolly.
Taylor, 52, then shared her sympathies for the actor, saying “There’s nothing worse than for you to find something like that out publicly is horrendous.”
“And the guy you’re working with,” added Lascher, 51.
Connolly continued to share how much the affair affected him and how he was left “heartbroken” by Cox in the final years of the series, which ran from 1995 to 1999. He added that the breakup was the “first time” he thought he was “going to die.”
“It was pretty terrible. Yeah, I was gutted. I couldn’t sleep. It was one of those jobs,” said Connolly.
Despite this Connolly confirmed that the former couple have “stayed in touch over the years” and still “catch up once in a while.” The actor also joked that long-time friend Taylor had a “front-row seat” to the “Bobcat incident.”
Following Connolly and Cox’s breakup, the actress got engaged to Goldthwait in the late ’90s and the two remained an item until 2005.
