Denis Leary is sharing the surprising way he went from smoking five packs of cigarettes a day to none at all.
“I smoked, like, five packs a day until, like, five years ago. It’s crazy,” Leary, 68, said during the Thursday, March 5, episode of the “Dear Chelsea” podcast. “I never f***ing intended to quit smoking.”
Denis said that he “loved” smoking and refused to quit even when asked to by his mother, his wife, Ann Leary, and their kids, Jack, 36, and Devin, 34. However, he ultimately decided on a whim to put down the cigarettes for good.
“I was outside, like, in the summertime, like, five years ago, and I went outside to smoke a cigarette,” he continued. “And literally, at the end of that cigarette, I went, ‘Nah, I think I’m done.’”
Denis said he didn’t believe he would quit, but he went the next few days without having a single cigarette.
“I’m such a f***ing addictive personality that I just was like, ‘Oh, my brain without even telling me, was like, ‘Alright, so we’re done now. This was the last one,’” he noted.
Denis said his sudden decision to quit even surprised Ann, 63, whom he married in 1989.
In 2024, Ann opened up about the secret to her decades-long marriage with Denis, revealing that not seeing each other as much as they wanted to “early on in the marriage” was “key.”
“I think that’s the key to a successful marriage,” she said on an episode of Martha Stewart’s podcast. “I’m fascinated by him.”
Ann continued, “It’s wonderful when he comes home. He always works with really interesting people. As you know, Martha, I’m a bit of a hermit. So I like to hear what exciting things he’s done, but I like to stay home. But I just find him funny. I think we just — we get along. We have [a] great history together.”
Ann added that she and Denis have constant communication in their relationship.
“We’ve been together so long, no matter where he is, he’ll call me and say, ‘Turn on CNN,’ or ‘turn on this channel,’ because it’s somebody,” she explained. “We both have a thing because, in the past, we knew. It’s just fun to have that kind of history. You probably have friends like that. You know?”
Of course, their marriage wasn’t always easy. In 2013, Ann wrote the essay “Rallying to Keep the Game Alive” about nearly divorcing Denis.
“People don’t often write about marriages that almost don’t work out,” Ann told The New York Times. “And in our case, no one, not even our kids, knew what was going on with us. We’d covered it up so well that our kids were astonished to hear that we ever had a hard part in our marriage. They were like, ‘Wait, what?’ They had no idea. They were in middle school, high school, absorbed in their own thing. And we weren’t screaming and hurting each other — it was more like a cold war. But I was very aware it was a crisis.”
![Sullivan s Crossing s Scott Patterson Discusses [Redacted] s Fate After Shooting I Cried So Much 487](/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Sullivan-s-Crossing-s-Scott-Patterson-Discusses-Redacted-s-Fate-After-Shooting-I-Cried-So-Much-487-1.jpg?crop=177px%2C0px%2C800px%2C799px&resize=600%2C600&quality=86&strip=all)
