Billy Baldwin: ‘I Always Knew That Everything Was Gonna Be OK’ In My Marriage

Billy Baldwin and wife Chynna Phillips have weathered some storms in their marriage, but he never doubted they were going to make it as a couple.

“For some reason I knew… I always knew that everything was gonna be OK,” the actor, currently starring on NBC’s “Parenthood,” told Access Hollywood Live’s Billy Bush and Kit Hoover on Tuesday.

For a little more than a year, things were tough for the pair. Chynna filed for divorce in February (a filing she later withdrew), and she underwent treatment in rehab for anxiety issues – including for what Billy said was in part due to the publication of her sister, Mackenzie Phillips’ autobiography, “High on Arrival.”

Mackenzie’s autobiography – released in September 2009 — included allegations that the “One Day At A Time” actress had a sexual relationship with the two women’s father.

“That was one of a list of five or six things that were going on and I knew once we sort of sorted through all the extraneous stuff and then if Chynna said she still had a problem, then we had a problem,” Billy said of how they repaired their union. “I needed to get to that point where we sort of dealt with that and that was all sort of taken off the table and if you looked at what we had between the two of us, I was always confident there wasn’t going to be a problem.”

Billy said that work added to Chynna’s stress, including the pressures from touring with her then musical outfit, Chynna & Vaughan.

“She was going out on tour; she was doing like 40 shows over three months; she was gonna be away on some ratty tour bus for 14 weeks and that was what really triggered the whole thing… was not seeing the kids for two or three weeks at a time. As that was coming around the corner in August, as she was about to leave in September, then the whole sort of house of cards came down.”

The actor, who returns to “Gossip Girl” as Serena van der Woodsen’s (Blake Lively’s character) dad early next year, said the couple just had to do the work to get their marriage back in shape.

“When you look at the good vs. the bad in the person… you look at the good vs. the bad in a relationship… the good in my relationship outweighed the bad [by] an avalanche,” Billy said. “It was overwhelmingly good. And I always knew that once we sorted through some things that were going on with me, some things that were going on with her, some things that were going on with us… The stuff going on with us was the least of our problems.”