Claire Danes is opening up about how she really felt when she found out that she was pregnant at 44-years-old. The actress, who is now 46, already had two children, now 13-year-old Cyrus and 7-year-old Rowan, when she found out she was expecting a third. At the time, she did not believe she could get pregnant again.
Upon discovering the shocking news, Danes says she called her OBGYN in “convulsive tears,” she said to Amy Poehler while appearing on an episode of her Good Hang with Amy Poehler podcast.
“It was a pure, like, meltdown,” she said.
Because of her age, Danes didn’t know that pregnancy was even an option for her at the time.
“None of this was by design,” she went on. “I didn’t know it was physically possible. I was 44.”
Danes, who is married to Hugh Dancy, has been open about her struggles to get pregnant in the past.
“Rowan was very hard-earned. I had to do two rounds of IVF,” she revealed.
Going into her third pregnancy, Danes was admittedly “terrified” and experienced some “shame”.
“Like I was naughty. I’d been caught fornicating past the point I was meant to,” she said. “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.”
Ultimately, however, things all worked out okay, and Danes and Dancy welcomed a baby girl, Shay, in 2023.
Because she already had two sons, Danes had anticipated that her third child would also be a boy. Upon discovering that she would have a daughter, she said she was happily surprised.
Each of the actresses’ three children is approximately 5 years apart.
"It's a trip. I mean, I have a teenager and a toddler at once," she said.