Former Grey’s Anatomy star Chyler Leigh and her husband, Nathan West, have quietly separated after 20 years of marriage.
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Although she confirmed the news, Leigh didn’t reveal what led to the separation.
“I think getting to a point where my relationship with my ex had reached a point where it was just time,” she explained during her recent appearance on The Books That Changed My Life podcast. “It was time to let it go. Even after such a long time. We’d been together—it would be 26 years this year.”
The estranged couple shares three children.
Leigh noted that the split was “amicable” and they were focusing on co-parenting. “We’re doing all the things that we can,” she continued. “But just hit a point where it was like, ‘Okay, what you want and what I want aren’t really lining up anymore.’ And I’d rather us be on good terms and us not harbor the resentment and the anger—all that stuff. It’s not worth it.”
” And when it becomes so abundantly apparent, and the kids are picking up on it and the whole family, it just shifts the mood and the dynamic of everything,” she noted.
Leigh Said Her and West’s ‘Family Trauma’ Impacted The Marriage
Continuing to speak about the split, Leigh opened up about how her and West’s “family trauma” had impacted their long-running marriage.
“We’re just perpetuating that cycle,” she explained. “And so, it was like, ‘Okay, we have to make a choice. We have to make a decision.’”
The couple first met on the set of a WB pilot in 1999. They got married three years later.
During her 2024 appearance on Live with Kelly and Mark, Leigh said she knew she would marry West the day she met him. “I came around the corner, and he’s just kind of chilling on the ground,” she said at the time. “I was like, ‘That’s the guy I’m gonna marry.’”
Leigh also wrote in a 2020 letter how she and West handled her lesbian persona in Supergirl.
“It’s been a long and lonely road for both my husband and myself,” she shared. “But I can wholeheartedly say that after all these years, he and I are still discovering the depths of ourselves and each other, but throughout our journey we’ve learned to be proud of who we are, no matter the cost.”