A little more than two years after she and her husband, Hugh Dancy, welcomed their child, Claire Danes opened up about the mental struggles she had while pregnant with daughter Shay in her early 40s.
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During a recent appearance on Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang, Danes discussed first learning she was pregnant at 44. She had told a friend she thought she might be pregnant while they were at a spa together.
“I totally lost my mind last night and just decided I was pregnant,” she said. “I went down this crazy rabbit hole and finally looked up what the odds are of naturally conceiving at 44, and they’re like less than 1%.’
She then said, “I was like ‘so that obviously is ridiculous.'”
A friend revealed she had a dream that she herself was pregnant, but was in the actress’s body.
Danes said that after the conversation, she had “two strong cocktails” and then decided to take a test the next day. “It was like, bold, cap lock PREGNANT and I burst into tears.”
The Homeland star revealed she suffered a mental breakdown after taking the pregnancy test. “I called my OBGYN in convulsive tears,” she recalled. “It was a pure—it was all meltdown.”
She further pointed out, “None of this was by design. I didn’t know it was physically possible. I was 44.”
Danes and Dancy also share sons Cyrus, 13, and Rowan, 7. The actress pointed out that she had previously thought that conceiving naturally in her 40s was “so unlikely.”
“I was so old when that happened,” she continued. “I didn’t think it was possible.”
The Actress Said She Experienced Unexpected Emotions During Her Latest Pregnancy
Although she had never predicted she would be pregnant in her 40s, Danes said she was also surprised by the emotions she experienced during the pregnancy.
“Suddenly, I felt a funny shame,” she explained. “I was ‘naughty.’ I’d been caught fornicating past the point I was meant to. It was weird, and it was like I found an edge that I hadn’t been quite conscious of. I was going outside of the parameters a little bit. That was wild.”
Danes further admitted she was terrified amid the pregnancy, and thankfully, everything was “all OK.”
“And then this beautiful girl emerged,” the actress declared. “And she’s the best, and none of it was up to me, and I’m just delighted.”
Meanwhile, Danes said she has since embraced having children at a different stage of life. “There’s about five years between each,” she noted. “But it’s a trip. I have a teenager and a toddler.”