Blair Underwood Recalls the Moment He Landed in the Tabloids

Blair Underwood prefers to live a “low key” life, but he once briefly became tabloid fodder.

Underwood, 61, sits down with the TV One interview series Uncensored this week for a conversation about his personal life and his four decades working in Hollywood.

At a recent press conference promoting the episode, the Emmy Award-winning actor told reporters he’s “an open book.”

He said “no topic was off limits” when he spoke with TV One, including his divorce from first wife Desiree DaCosta in 2021.

“I got divorced about five years ago and remarried two years ago,” Underwood shared at the news conference. “It was the first time I got some hits in the media, in my 40 years in the business. I’m pretty low key. I keep my life pretty private.”

He said Uncensored asked him if he wanted to avoid discussing the collapse of his marriage, but he decided to explain what happened in his own words.

“[The divorce] is something the producers asked me, ‘Are you willing to talk about that?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I jumped at the chance to tell my truth and my story, knowing of course, it is my story. It’s personal,” he said.

“Beyond that, that’s something that people thought might be off limits, but it wasn’t off limits to me. I wanted to talk about it.”

He explained the divorce was “years in the making.”

As for his career, Underwood is best known for his roles on television in L.A. Law, City of Angels, Sex and the City, Quantico, and When They See Us. He also starred in the films Set It Off, Origin, and RZA’s One Spoon of Chocolate, which premiered last week at L.A.’s Pan African Film Festival.

Underwood told Uncensored he almost passed on Set It Off because of a problem he had with the script.

“Jada Pinkett’s character, who I ended up falling in love with, my character Keith fell in love with — her name is Stony in the movie. There’s a scene where she’s going to sell her body because she wants to raise money to send her brother to college. And I literally threw the script across the room,” he recalled. “I said, ‘No, I don’t want to see that.'”

His manager convinced him to read the entire script and he changed his mind.

“Once I finished it, it made sense,” he recalled. “I swear to you, I’m glad I did it because people talk about Set It Off to this day.

You can hear more from Blair Underwood when his episode of Uncensored airs Thursday, Feb. 26, 8PM/7C on TV One.