Ex-spouses Wayne Brady and Mandie Taketa, who are still very much present in each others’ lives as close friends, coparents and producing partners, know their family is unique — that’s why they’re now on reality television.
“There’s a reason why our show is on TV, because we’re one of the only ones like us,” Brady told TheWrap of his new Freeform show. “The family that inspired me is us and and the hard work that it took to get here.”
“Wayne Brady: The Family Remix,” premiering Wednesday, gives viewers an inside peek into Brady and Taketa’s unusual dynamic alongside their 21-year-old daughter, Maile, and Taketa’s life partner, Jason Michael Fordham. Together, the family unit calls themselves the “core four.”
Prior to landing on a reality series, Brady and Taketa were approached for a scripted series “a couple times,” but they ultimately decided an unscripted format would be the “best option” to authentically represent their family. “It was … hard to to get it on the page and have it be really real,” Brady recalled.
“You can’t make up what’s actually happening in our lives. It can’t be more exciting than the real thing,” Taketa told TheWrap, adding that “it’s very difficult for writers to write for voices like ours being Asian and Black households. So we just said, ‘Hey, let’s take a chance at doing it this way.’ We feel like we can help more people anyway and hopefully inspire more people by just being ourselves.”
While Brady admits he is used to “a certain level of scrutiny” — which Taketa has also encountered by virtue of their marriage — the parents’ next step was considering if moving forward with a reality show would be the right thing for their daughter, who is currently a student at Loyola Marymount University and pursuing her dream of becoming a musician and actress.
“As a mom, I’m nervous — I want to protect her and keep her safe,” Taketa said. “But also as her mom, I know Maile, and she’s a pretty healthy individual, probably healthier than Wayne and I, to be honest — the way that she processes information and her emotional intellect. I hope Wayne and I equipped her with the tools that she needs to … process in a healthy way.”
With the former couple also serving as executive producers for the series via their A Wayne & Mandie Creative production company alonside Fremantle, including Maile in the series was essential from a producing standpoint. “The things we’ve done as parents, the life that we live, it’s reflected in this young lady and she has her own point of view on this entire upbringing and situation,” Brady explained. “If she didn’t have a voice in the show, then it would have been incredibly skewed and dishonest.”
Wayne Brady Comes Out as Pansexual
The Freeform series also documents Brady’s coming out journey after he shared his pansexuality in August of last year. While the actor knows there might be “expectations and tropes” of drama stirred up in an unscripted format, he made it clear he prioritized moving at a pace that felt comfortable to him.
“The way that I navigated [it] was not letting anyone tell me how to navigate it, and that meant not … dating just for the sake of dating,” Brady said. “That would have been the easy way to navigate it. The hard way to navigate it is being by yourself and spending time with yourself until you’re really ready to make those changes and say, ‘OK, now I want to be with someone, whomever that person is, but first I got to be with myself’ — and I spent a lot of years not being with myself.”
Since coming out, Brady says the queer community has been “incredibly welcoming,” noting, “I’ve always had a relationship with the queer community, and now it’s just basically going from next door neighbor to cousin.”
As the family started filming the series, nothing was off limits, with Brady saying, “If we’re gonna commit to it, we’ve got to do it.” Within even the first episode, Brady and Fordham discuss their history and the painful memories when Brady first learned Taketa and Fordham were dating — a conversation Brady says might not have been had if it weren’t for “The Family Remix.”
Getting through those tough conversations — especially on screen — became a way for the family to realize how strong they are (the former spouses were married from 1999 to 2007). “Every time we go through challenging times as a family and we come out the other end and we’re still like, ‘Hey, I like you, I love you and I still want to be around you,’ that’s pretty cool,” Taketa said. “I’m proud of us.”
While “Wayne Brady: The Family Remix” follows the core four’s various pursuits and challenges at this particular moment of their lives, Brady and Taketa said they’re open to continuing the series with another season, should that be the right choice for their family.
“We want it to go as long as A) everyone is having fun, B) the viewers want it, and C) as long as life makes sense for us to show it,” Brady said. “The good thing about something like this is, as long as life is ‘life-ing,’ which, we hope it goes for a long time and we have something to share, then we want to do it.”
“We need to stay healthy as a family,” Taketa added. “I think that’s the most important thing. Can we do this again in a healthy way?”
“Wayne Brady: The Family Remix” premieres Wednesday, July 24, at 10 p.m. ET on Freeform. New episodes will then air Wednesdays before streaming the next day on Hulu.
