Actor Wayne Brady knows his family unit is unlike any other on television. His blended family includes his ex-wife, best friend and business partner, Mandie Taketa; their 21-year-old daughter, Maile Brady; Taketa’s life partner, Jason Michael Fordham, who was also one of Brady’s former backup dancers; and Taketa and Fordham’s young, adopted son, Sundance-Isamu.
Brady and his loved ones will take center stage in “Wayne Brady: The Family Remix,” a new reality series that premieres Wednesday on Freeform. The eight-episode first season finds Brady at a crossroads in his personal and professional lives and offers an intimate look at the dynamics of his tight-knit inner circle, culminating in his decision to come out publicly as pansexual in a lighthearted TikTok and an interview with People last August.
Brady’s blended family first attracted widespread attention during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they would often perform TikTok dances together. While their posts would elicit all kinds of online reactions — some questioned the likelihood that two exes would stay best friends, let alone quarantine together with one of their current partners, while others became fascinated with the adults’ co-parenting relationship — Brady and Taketa both insisted that this configuration has long become the norm in their family.
“Growing up in Hawaii, it’s very community-based, family-based, so it’s not weird to me to love people that love you back and that care for you and keep you safe,” Taketa told NBC News. “This dynamic was not weird to me until other people started telling me that it was weird, like at parent-teacher conferences. It’s what feels good.”
Brady added: “It wasn’t until I met Mandie and her family and started calling her dad, Ron, dad that I realized that I truly didn’t know what it meant to be loved and accepted for who you are. I never knew what that felt like, because I wasn’t from a big family. So what’s normal to me is the family that you choose.”
Over the years, Brady said, he and Taketa would be approached to turn their lives into a multigenerational sitcom, but the scripts they read were “never as funny as real life” or attempted to “distill the family down to an all-Black family.” By taking matters into their own hands, Brady and Taketa, who both serve as executive producers of “The Family Remix,” wanted to tell their story of a multiracial family that has chosen to stay together. It’s that kind of unconditional love that has allowed Brady to come to terms with his sexuality.
About a decade ago, Brady came out to Taketa over the phone. “My first feeling was happiness,” Taketa recalled of her reaction. “I was like, ‘OK, good. Now you know this, and you’re comfortable enough to talk to me about it, so how do we nurture this side of you in the healthiest way?’ And then there’s a part of me that was afraid just because he is a public figure, he is a Black man here in America, and I want to protect him. But it made me love Wayne even more, because it’s a privilege when someone shares something like that with you.”
But Brady said he spent years wrestling with his own queerness. He knew he didn’t identify as gay, despite being attracted to other men, but he felt being labeled as bisexual was “too limiting.” It wasn’t until Brady sat down with his daughter — who had overheard her parents discussing whether to broach the sensitive topic in “The Family Remix” two years ago — that Brady began to better understand the nuances of sexuality.
“When my dad told me that he was queer, it did not faze me at all, and I mean that in the most loving way,” said Maile Brady, who explained the term “pansexuality” to her father. “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 people with just these qualities — masculine qualities, feminine qualities. And what is masculine, feminine, all those things?’ … This is a casual dinner conversation for our family. I’m so fortunate to be able to have parents and a system where we can have those conversations very freely.”
Fordham, for his part, said he felt “really proud” of Brady’s desire “to share more of himself with the world” and wanted to support that mission in any way he could.
“Wayne has so much freedom onstage, and I’ve always wished that he feels that same level of freedom in his day-to-day life,” he said. “So it just seemed so classic, so on-brand to bring something so personal onto a main stage, such as filming our lives, and I think that’s just how Wayne has to do it.”
Brady, who admitted he has spent much of the last year pondering the best answer to this question, felt there was a confluence of factors that led him to finally come out publicly: He felt shame about not being able to share his sexuality with his late grandmother, Valerie, whom he considered his real mother; he “wanted to be an example to that young Black man or to that young theater kid” or anyone who may look to him for inspiration; and he had just turned 50 and “finally wanted to be happy” to love whomever he wants.
“I could have just told one other person and kept it moving, but because I’m in the public eye, that also is not an option for me if I wanted to live a true life,” said Brady, who is still single but has received messages from suitors of various gender identities. “Because if I do want to show up at an event with a woman, or a man, or someone nonbinary or trans, to be able to have that complete freedom, the world would need to know. People in the comments are like, ‘Well, we don’t need to know all that.’ Well, yes, you do, because if I would’ve shown up with someone that didn’t meet what you thought, then it would’ve been a whole thing.”
Brady said he knew that he needed to make a change — and it just so happened to coincide with the decision to open his life up to a camera crew for the first time. “I was like, ‘Well, we’re doing this show. I just can’t not share [this],” he said.
“It was scary, because there’s a whole thing that I can’t even get into about why I was afraid to come out at one point when I thought I was bisexual because of bi erasure, and now there’s pan erasure and all these stories that I just wasn’t ready to deal with,” Brady added. “It’s like, ‘What?! I’m Black. I’m just dealing with [being] Black, and now you want me to deal with all this stuff, too?’ So I had to come out when I felt that I could do it all — and I felt I could do it all because of the three people on camera with me right now.”
For more from NBC Out, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
