Brian Austin Greenis opening up about his one-time romance with"Martin" actress Tichina Arnold.
The '90s teen heartthrobsaid during a recent appearance on the "Funny Knowing You" podcast that he dated Arnold while starring in hiscareer-making role on "Beverly Hills, 90210."They met, he said, while she wasworking on "Martin,"which aired, like "90210," on Fox.
"Hip-hop was my world,"Greentold podcast host Deon Cole during the Wednesday episode. "I was doing hip-hop clubs. I was going to all the places where hip-hop was existing. So, when you're dating someone, you usually date the people that you're around. So, of course, I was dating majority Black women at the time, because we had common interests."
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Green,who is white, added that it wasn't "a conscious choice of 'I want to date someone culturally who's different.' That never even crossed my mind because we shared the same culture."
Of his relationship with Arnold, Green said: "Because we were working together and we were around each other all the time, we just got along really well. So we ended up fooling around and kind of dating."
The actress, who starred as Pamela James on "Martin" for five seasons in the mid '90s, wasn't keen on sharing their relationship though, according to Green.
"She was very clear on Day 1 [that] nobody can know about this. And so I was in my early 20s. I was living in a culture that wasn't accepting of me. But there was no way to get out of it because that was just where my brain and my heart were," he said. "So, I was really insecure. And then I have someone who I'm attracted to who's telling me like, 'Oh, you can't tell anybody.'"
While later he said that Arnold warmed up to the idea of sharing their romance with the public, the damage was already done.
"I think somewhere in my mind I had that subconscious switch of like, 'Oh, this isn't a real relationship. This is just a thing that we're doing. And now maybe her view of it has changed a little bit, but it didn't even start in a healthy way,'" Green said.
The actor, who later married"Transformers" star Megan Fox,with whom he shares two children, said he and Arnold have long since cleared the air. Arnold, 56, who now stars in "The Neighborhood," also addressed their relationship in an appearance on the same podcast in December.
"I told him, I said, 'The reason why we've come to the end of our road, because I know I see you dating all these Black women now, you're dating me and you're not going to end up with a Black woman,'" she told Cole. "'You're going to share your riches and your legacy with someone white. And so I'm getting off this train.'"
She added, however, that "it was a great experience."
"He was a good human being. And I think in life I had to experience that, so I know what the other side is," she said. Arnold has been married twice, splitting with her second husband, Rico Hines, in 2016.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Brian Austin Green secretly dated Tichina Arnold during '90210'
