Danny DeVito has been married to Rhea Perlman for over four decades. He has also not lived with her for nine of them. Both of those things are true, both of them are intentional, and he has apparently made peace with that contradiction in a way that most people spend a lifetime failing to manage with relationships that actually ended.
The 81-year-old actor sat down with AARP The Magazine for what became their August-September 2026 cover story, and somewhere between discussing his fifty-year career and his upcoming film roles, he addressed the question that Hollywood has been asking since 2017: why haven’t he and Perlman just made it official and divorced? His answer, stripped of all ceremony, was essentially: why would we?
A Love Story That Started Off-Broadway
Perlman first met DeVito in 1971 at an off-Broadway play called The Shrinking Bride. She had gone to see a friend in the performance, but couldn’t keep her eyes off DeVito. By her own account, she introduced herself immediately after the curtain fell, moved into his Manhattan apartment a few weeks later, and never quite looked back.
The two began dating in 1971 and eventually married on January 28, 1982, welcoming three children: Lucy Chet DeVito, Grace Fan DeVito, and Jacob Daniel DeVito. By the time they walked down the aisle, the relationship was already a decade old. This was not a whirlwind. This was two people who had been choosing each other, repeatedly and deliberately, for years before they ever signed a certificate.
Looking back in his AARP interview, DeVito described how they fell for each other: they liked off-Broadway plays, went to movies constantly, and made short films together. “We had a lot in common, and we fell in love,” he said. Together, the couple also established the production company Jersey Films, which counts Pulp Fiction, Erin Brockovich, and Out of Sight among its credits. Their creative partnership was woven into their domestic one from the start. They most notably appeared on screen together in the 1996 classic Matilda, playing the neglectful Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood, as well as in the sitcom Taxi.
The Separation That Wasn’t Quite a Separation
They first announced their separation in October 2012 after 30 years of marriage and over 40 years together, but reconciled in March 2013.
That first split did not last long. “Rhea and I are really close and actually still together – just separate but together,” DeVito told Extra in December 2012. He was already reaching for the vocabulary he would keep using for the next decade-plus: not married in the conventional sense, not divorced either, but something of their own invention that didn’t have a clean name.
The two separated again in March 2017 and have remained apart since, though they have never divorced. By then, Perlman had developed her own clear-eyed perspective on why the paperwork felt beside the point. As she put it in a 2018 interview: “We’ve been together a very long time, so there’s a lot of love and history. We agree on enough things, so why ruin that with the yucky things that come with a divorce?”
“What For?”
Perlman has been consistent on this point for years. In a May 2019 appearance on Watch What Happens Live, she stated plainly that she is “not getting divorced,” adding: “What for?” It has become, essentially, her position statement on the matter – two words that manage to be both funny and completely sincere at the same time.
DeVito’s most recent comments to AARP The Magazine in 2026 are in the same key. “We’re always over at her house,” he told AARP, noting he and Perlman talk daily and reunite for weekly meals. “We see the grandchildren together, all of that. So that’s a good relationship.” Good enough, it turns out, that the actors are still technically married despite going their separate ways in 2017.
DeVito and Perlman share kids Lucy, 43, Grace, 41, and Jacob, 38, and they simply don’t see the point in making the legal split official.
The Hard Part They Don’t Skip Over
What makes the DeVito-Perlman story something other than a feel-good Hollywood footnote is that neither of them has pretended the separation was painless.
Speaking on the Wiser Than Me podcast with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Perlman was direct: “I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, it was very difficult at first. And there were a lot of reasons that we separated,” she said, without divulging details. “It took time for us to come to this, somehow, pretty decent understanding and relationship with each other.”
As reported by NBC News from that May 2023 podcast appearance, Perlman also acknowledged the texture of the life she has built since: “I live alone with my little dog, who is my partner in life now. I don’t like living alone. I like being alone. I like having time to myself.” The gap between those two things – disliking the circumstance of solitude while genuinely valuing the solitude itself – is something Perlman locates with precision.
A Family That Stayed Intact
The fact that Perlman and DeVito share three children gives them a significant reason to remain in each other’s lives. “There was a hard transition, and for the kids, and everything, but everybody’s got a good relationship with Danny, and with me, and with each other, and that’s all we care about. You know, we’re a family,” Perlman noted.
That family continues to do things together that most divorced couples cannot manage. DeVito and Perlman still occasionally walk the red carpet together. They accompanied daughter Lucy to the 75th Emmy Awards in January 2024 and spoke on stage together at the 33rd Champions for Children charity event in April 2025.
They also work together. DeVito recently produced the comedy-thriller Drag, about two sisters with a contentious relationship, which starred his children Lucy and Jake alongside Lizzy Caplan. A man who no longer speaks to his ex-wife does not produce films with their children and attend the premiere together. The structure of their post-separation life looks, from the outside, remarkably like the structure of their marriage – minus, presumably, whatever it was that made the marriage stop working.
The living apart together dynamic they have settled into is rarer than it looks. It requires both people to want it, which is the piece that cannot be manufactured.
Still Working, Still Going
In the AARP cover interview, DeVito, 81, reflected on how he met Perlman, 78, in the 1970s and their estranged relationship five decades later. But the conversation was never only about her. To most Americans, DeVito is the outrageously funny characters he played on Taxi and still plays on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but for most of his five-decade career he has also been a successful director and producer, including for the Quentin Tarantino classic Pulp Fiction.
DeVito is returning to the big screen to reprise his role as Grandpa Eddie in Jumanji: Open World, due out on Christmas 2026. “The older I get, the better I get at this, so just bring it on,” he says. It is the kind of line that is funny precisely because it is also true.
As for his personal routines, DeVito does his best to take care of himself – drinking green juices, limiting alcohol, working out daily, puttering in his yard and hanging out with friends. He has, by any measure, built a full life. Rhea Perlman is still part of that life. Just differently than she was before.
Read More: How Did Demi Moore Survive Her Toxic Marriage With Ashton Kutcher
What This Is Really About
Hollywood produces no shortage of couples who stay together too long for the wrong reasons, and an equal number who split cleanly and never speak again. DeVito and Perlman have done something that is genuinely harder than either of those: they dismantled the romantic structure of their relationship, kept the rest of it, and have spent nine years maintaining what they kept.
In 2022, Perlman told People: “We’re still separated, but we see each other often, and we’re still a family. We can do things together, we can do things separately. I’m really, really glad that Danny and I were able to navigate some rough days to be able to have this different kind of relationship. I think it’s pretty rare, but we agree on so many things that it makes sense.”
She’s right that it’s rare. What she doesn’t quite say, but what seems evident from every interview they’ve given across the past decade, is that it’s rare not because the setup is unusual but because it requires two people who are both willing to put the family above the grievance.
The Danny DeVito divorce never happened because neither of them wanted one badly enough to push for it. And looking at the life they’ve built in its absence – the grandchildren visited together, the films made with their kids, the weekly meals, the red carpets walked side by side – the word “divorce” starts to feel like a solution to a problem they didn’t have.
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