“I wasn't being authentically me,” Wayne Brady revealed during the TCA Summer Press Tour during a press conference for the unscripted Freeform series, Wayne Brady: The Family Remix. As a versatile performer of the stage and screen, audiences know Wayne Brady for his improv chops and his charismatic hosting duties, but like his acting gigs, the Wayne Brady you thought you knew was a performance. The Wayne Brady you get on the new reality series is the raw, unfiltered real deal. “I can walk onstage and be charming and affable and make you laugh and look in the camera and do my thing. I could make millions of people happy, but I would go home, and I'd feel like a piece of [garbage]. I couldn’t do that anymore.”
(Rob Latour)
Part of the issue plaguing Wayne Brady’s private life was struggling with his sexuality – confused feelings of same-sex attraction, but not feeling like the description of bisexuality fit him. “I explained to him what pansexual meant,” shared Wayne’s daughter Maile Brady, who helped her father figure out his own unique identity. It was a conversation she wasn’t meant to be a part of, but living under the same roof, she couldn’t help but overhear her parents talking. “I just overheard it, and I was like, ‘All right, anyway, what are we eating for dinner?’ But I think in talking to both of my parents about sexuality and queerness, and the ever-changing sexuality spectrum, it is really interesting and insightful to be, like, oh, so maybe you're attracted to this person, or this person, or people with just these qualities, you know, masculine qualities, feminine qualities. And what is masculine, feminine, all those things? And we go in circles round and around. This is like a casual dinner conversation for our family. And I think it helps me grow; it helps them grow. And I'm so fortunate to be able to have parents and a system where we can have those conversations very freely.”
The show’s subtitle, The Family Remix, is fitting because, as Wayne Brady explains in the introduction of the first episode, they are anything but a conventional family. Wayne is Maile’s father, and Maile’s mother, Mandie Taketa, is Wayne’s ex-wife but also his best friend and producing partner. “There were times when we were shooting that I'm, like, I don't think we can be that honest,” Mandie shared about the vulnerability of opening up their lives to cameras, even as an executive producer of the show. “Wayne was depressed, and if you've ever been depressed and really felt what that's like, it's hard to get out of bed. So I'm waking up going, ‘Wayne are you okay? We need to go in to work no matter how we're feeling today because we said we're going to do this, and I hate to do this to you, but it's yes or no.’” But that’s one of the strengths of the series, watching Wayne Brady lift himself out of one of the lowest points in his life, and all with the support of his family.
“Now I feel I'm even better,” Wayne Brady revealed about being on the other side of a low point with his depression and how it’s improved his life and work. “When I go to Let's Make a Deal tomorrow, I'm having more fun. When I shoot a sitcom, and I just got finished doing a movie, Wayne bounds onto set. I'm happy so I can show up. I hope that any project I do from this point on is affected positively because I was able to be honest.”
(Rob Latour)
One of the most unique parts of the Brady household dynamic is the presence of Mandie’s long-term boyfriend, Jason Michael Fordham. “There is a way to misrepresent our family as well; For example, create a narrative that Wayne and I are jealous of each other,” Jason shared, with any beef between the two loves of Mandie’s life squashed before cameras started rolling. “If that somehow was constructed in the production or preproduction or post-production, that's an error, in our opinion. So it's more like steering it to not necessarily what we think of ourselves, but what we know to be true. I'm not jealous of Wayne. That's not our dynamic. I feel like that's where Wayne and Mandie really stepped in to realign this message that we're sharing.”
If nothing else, Wayne Brady: The Family Remix is the fulfillment of a wish for this family to work together. “We had a few sitcom deals,” Wayne Brady revealed, having once acted alongside his daughter Maile on The Bold and the Beautiful. “Every time the script was presented, the network reads it, and it was never as funny as real life. Or, even worse, not only was it not as funny, but you’re looking at a blended family; You have a Black man, Mandie – Japanese/Caucasian, you have our daughter, this blended family. When they would look at us, they’d go, ‘Well, no, we can’t have that,’ and they would distill the family down to an all-Black family, so no one could tell the story the way that we could just show it… So Mandie and I, this production company that we have, we partnered with Fremantle, and then we came to Hulu and said, ‘Let’s tell the story because we know that it’s a story that needs to be seen.’”
See Wayne Brady and his unique family structure support each other through life’s ups and downs in Wayne Brady: The Family Remix, premiering Wednesday, July 24th, at 10/9c on Freeform. Episodes will be available to stream the day after broadcast on Hulu.