Chris Rock Says He Hasn’t Watched Porn in Five or Six Years

Chris Rock says he gave up pornography years ago and counts it among the things he had to fix after his marriage fell apart.

“I was not a great husband. I watched a lot of porn. I don’t watch porn anymore. I haven’t watched porn in five, six years,” Rock, 61, told GQ senior correspondent Zach Baron in a cover interview for the magazine’s 2026 Men of the Year issue, published Nov. 3. Rock was the first of this year’s honorees to be announced, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Rock said he was not proud of that period but saw it as something he had to go through. He compared himself to a superhero who misuses new powers before learning his limits. “I tested my powers. I definitely realized I wasn’t God or anywhere near him, and I was severely humbled, as I should have been,” he said, according to Complex.

The subject came up when Baron asked about the 12 years between “Top Five,” the 2014 film Rock wrote and directed, and his new feature, “Misty Green.” Rock pointed to his divorce from Malaak Compton-Rock. The couple married in 1996, separated in 2014 and divorced in 2016. They have two daughters. “Nobody has a successful divorce, so that takes time,” he said. He described going back on tour, twice, to rebuild his finances, then losing time to the pandemic.

Rock also told GQ he had gone into therapy in rough shape. “My personal life wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and I’ll leave it at that,” he said, adding that he “went in there crying.”

None of this is entirely new. In “Tamborine,” his 2018 Netflix special, Rock told audiences he had been unfaithful and addicted to pornography, and he described the divorce in unsparing terms. Two years later he gave a progress report on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show. In September 2020 he said he had gone about 280 days without watching pornography, according to Stern’s website. He said his therapist believed he had been using it to manage anxiety and unresolved trauma, and he described the “dopamine hits” leaving him in a daze. Quitting, he said then, had made him better at socializing and more able to enjoy other people.

The GQ interview covers more than his personal life. Rock said he wants to stop talking about the 2022 Academy Awards, where Will Smith slapped him onstage. “Something happened. It wasn’t cool. And I would like to move on,” he said. He talked about directing “Misty Green,” a film about a talented actress who cannot get out of her own way, and said he is writing a book and considering more stand-up.

Mark Groubert, who called Rock one of the best stand-up comics of all time, opened the segment by saying that pornography addiction is real. “Porn addiction of course is quite real,” he said, and he returned to the point after reading the GQ excerpts.

Groubert read the 2020 day count as a sign of structured recovery work. “Obviously in 2020 he’s already counting days,” he said. “So I presume he’s in some sort of a program, otherwise he wouldn’t be counting days.” Rock has spoken publicly about therapy but has not said that he belongs to a 12-step or similar program. Groubert presented the point as his own inference.

He agreed with the explanation Rock attributed to his therapist, that the habit was a way of coping with anxiety and trauma, and called it probably accurate. He also noted that Rock had admitted to infidelity during the marriage, which Rock himself acknowledged in “Tamborine” and again in the GQ interview.

Groubert said he respected Rock for speaking about it on the record. “More power to Chris Rock for coming out on this,” he said. “I wish more people would do what Chris Rock just did because that took a lot of courage.” He said he hoped Rock would be able to keep it up.

“Misty Green,” Rock’s fourth feature as a director, stars Rosalind Eleazar and Anna Kendrick.