Ever since the news broke that Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady were going their separate ways after 13 years of marriage, there have been many headlines about what she’s up to now: how she’s spending her time, how she’s getting back into modeling and who she’s been hanging out with. Now, in a new interview, the supermodel is getting candid about what her life looks like now and how she feels months after the split.
In her cover story with Vanity Fair, the supermodel compared the end of her marriage to “the death of my dream.” Adding, “It’s tough because you imagine your life was going to be a certain way, and you did everything you could, you know? I believed in fairy tales when I was a kid. I think it’s beautiful to believe in that. I mean, I’m so grateful I did.”
Bündchen and Brady share two children, Benjamin Rein, 12, and daughter Vivian Lake, 9, (she considers Brady’s son Jack with ex Bridget Moynahan her “bonus” kid). “When I was 26 years old and he was 29 years old, we met, we wanted a family, we wanted things together,” Bündchen recalled. “As time goes by, we realize that we just wanted different things, and now we have a choice to make. That doesn’t mean you don’t love the person. It just means that in order for you to be authentic and truly live the life that you want to live, you have to have somebody who can meet you in the middle, right? It’s a dance. It’s a balance.”
She says she wants nothing but the best for Brady, who officially retired from the NFL for the second time in early February. “Listen, I have always cheered for him, and I would continue forever. If there’s one person I want to be the happiest in the world, it’s him, believe me. I want him to achieve and to conquer. I want all his dreams to come true. That’s what I want, really, from the bottom of my heart.”
What she wants for herself now is to do what makes her happy, which includes living at her Costa Rica compound (she also splits her time between Miami, where Brady is based). “I don’t want to be limited,” Bündchen said. “I want to spread my wings and fly.”
As one of the highest paid supermodels of all time, she’s been getting back into the swing of things with new editorials and campaigns, including a bikini-clad Burberry ad last year and the new Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama collaboration. But she doesn’t only see herself modeling in the future: “One of my dreams is I want to play a superhero,” she shared.
As for her love life, she brushes off the rumors that she’s dating her longtime jiu-jitsu instructor Joaquim Valente, whom she’s been seen with out and about with in Costa Rica multiple times, saying tabloids will “attach” her to anything. What she does is praise Joaquim and his brothers, Pedro and Gu, who are also instructors. “I’m so grateful to know all of them, because not only have they helped me and helped my kids, but they have become great friends, and Joaquim especially,” she said in her interview. “He’s our teacher and, most importantly, he’s a person that I admire and that I trust. It’s so good to have that kind of energy, to have my kids around that type of energy.”
She compared her situation to “a death and a rebirth,” but it looks like she’s currently on the rebirth side of her story. “No one is going to come save you. Never give your power away to nobody. This is your life. This is your movie. You are the director on it,” she said.
Wise words for anyone to live by!
Read GRAZIA USA’s Spring issue featuring cover star Lucy Boynton:
