Claire Danes is sharing the “funny shame” she felt after her most recent pregnancy.
The “Homeland” actor, who has three children with husband Hugh Dancy, spoke about her “oopsie-daisy third baby” during an appearance on the “Smartless” podcast on Monday.
“I was so old when that happened. I was 44,” Danes told hosts Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes.
“I didn’t think it was possible ― I really didn’t,” she said with a laugh. “I was terrified, but it all was OK.”
When Arnett asked Danes what it was like finding out she was pregnant at that stage in life, she answered that it “was actually really interesting.”
“Because I did not foresee this at all. And it was weird. Suddenly I felt like a funny shame,” the actor said. “I was naughty. Like, I had been caught, like, fornicating past the point I was meant to.”
The experience of getting pregnant later in life was both “weird” and “wild” because, to Danes, it was like “going outside of the parameters a bit.”
Danes and Dancy also share two other children, who are both boys: Cyrus, who will turn 13 in December, and Rowan, 7.
“It’s a trip. I mean, I have a teenager and a toddler,” Danes said, adding that she “got really, really lucky” that her last little one is a girl.
“My OBGYN was like, ‘You know, you’re having another boy.’ But no, turns out,” she said, despite adding that she still “would have been delighted” to have a third boy.
Danes has always been very open about pregnancy and motherhood, and has called being a mom “incredibly challenging” before.
“But, we still feel a pressure to talk about it in very romantic terms,” she said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK in 2014. “We all have that resentment at times and anxiety about being trapped by the role, that responsibility. And, then chemically it can run riot, and there’s no ‘off’ button.”
She described that part of parenting as “the hardest adjustment” for her.
“You always feel beholden to somebody. And, for so long they’re like koala bears, you just feel a physical responsibility to be there for them to cling to,” Danes said, adding that it’s all “pretty primal.”