Nick Cannon has opened up about how he wooed his ex-wife, Mariah Carey, revealing that he played hard to get to win her heart.
“It turned from my celebrity crush to, ‘Nah, she’s about to be my girlfriend.’ People were bugging, like, ‘There’s no way you can get Mariah Carey.’ I was like, ‘Watch, I’m telling you,’” Cannon, 37, recalled to TvOne’s “Uncensored” in an episode airing on Sunday.
“She had heard me speaking all these positive, secretive little nothings to her in interviews,” he said, adding that Carey, 48, told him at the 2007 Teen Choice Awards that she’d heard the sweet words he had said about her, per Page Six.
“From that day, I knew that she knew,” he said. “I doubled down, I started telling Da Brat, JD [Jermaine Dupri], ‘Tell Mariah I’m tryin’ to holla!’ People would just laugh it off.”
As reported by Page Six, in early 2008, Carey invited him to play the nerdy love interest in Touch My Body, but Cannon explained why he rejected the role offer.
“I was like, ‘I ain’t about to be in that video! People think I’m corny enough. You got me playing the nerd in your video? I’ll pass!’ So I told Mariah no, and people don’t tell Mariah ‘no.’ ”
Cannon did, however, offer to be in the video for Bye Bye, released in spring 2008.
“She called me and she was like, ‘Not only do I have another video that I want you to be my love interest for, but I want you to direct it,’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘Bam! I’m in there!’”
Six weeks later, the pair were married. In 2011, they welcomed twins Moroccan and Monroe. Fans were disappointed when the couple separated in 2014, and settled their divorce in fall 2016.
Mariah and Nick remain close friends and co-parents to their twins, now 7.
