Claire Danes revealed she went into a “meltdown” when she discovered she was pregnant with her third child at age 44.
The Homeland star revealed that she burst into tears when she found out she and her husband, the actor Hugh Dancy, were expecting their third child.
“I called my ob-gyn in convulsive tears. It was a pure … it was all meltdown,” the actress told Amy Poehler on her podcast Good Hang.
It wasn’t just Danes’ age that made the news a surprise but the fact that she previously struggled to conceive naturally.
“None of this was by design,” she said, adding that her three children – Cyrus, 13, Rowan, 7, and Shay, 2 – are all five years apart.
“I didn’t know it was physically possible — I was 44. And actually, Rowan [Danes’ second son] was very hard-earned. I had to do two rounds of IVF. It just was so unlikely.”
Danes, who shot to fame starring opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet, told Poehler she’d been at a spa with a close friend, when she confided her suspicions that she might be pregnant again.
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Danes said she told her friend she’d “totally lost my mind last night and just decided I was pregnant”.
“I went down this crazy rabbit hole and finally looked up what are the odds of naturally conceiving at 44 and they’re like less than one per cent.’ I was like ‘so that obviously is ridiculous’,” she told Poehler.
In response, her friend revealed that she’d had a dream that she herself was pregnant – but, was in Danes’ body.
Danes recalled that she had “two strong cocktails” before taking a test the following day.
“It was like bold, cap lock PREGNANT and I burst into tears,” she recalled.
“And then this beautiful girl emerged and she’s the best and none of it was up to me and I’m just delighted,” she said.
The chat with Poehler isn’t the first time Danes has spoken of her surprise pregnancy in her 40s.
In a November interview with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the Smartless podcast, Danes said her pregnancy experience was “really interesting.”
“It was weird — suddenly I felt, like, a funny shame … like I was naughty, like I had been caught fornicating past the point I was meant to,” she told them.
During a 2023 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon she said “this one was a surprise” and went on to reveal her daughter’s name for the first time.
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Celebrities who secretly welcomed babies
Earlier in her chat with Poehler, Danes said Shay, who was born in July 2023, was “very kind of in her head and dreamy”.
Danes and British actor Dancy first met in 2007 on the set of the romantic drama film Evening, and they married in 2009.
She was recently nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in the Netflix series The Beast in Me.
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