Claire Danes admits she had a 'meltdown' when she found out she was pregnant at 44

Claire Danes is used to navigating high-stakes storylines as an actress, but nothing quite prepared her in 2023 when she found out she was pregnant at 44. 

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Danes was a guest on Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang with Amy Poehler” podcast, where she opened up about her last pregnancy and the tears she shed. The pregnancy was “out of the blue" and came years after she’d already had two children with husband Hugh Dancy. “I called my OB/GYN in convulsive tears,” she admitted. “It was a pure meltdown."

At the time, Danes’ older kids were already spaced out - “They’re five years apart, each kid. None of this was by design,” she said with a laugh. At her age, she genuinely didn’t think another pregnancy was even possible. Her second child, Rowan, "was very hard-earned," she said, explaining that she had to do two rounds of IVF. "It was just so unlikely.”

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Which is why, when she started feeling off during a spa day with her best friend (who also happens to be a therapist), Danes spiraled, but then talked herself out of it. She went down what she called a “crazy rabbit hole,” Googling the odds of conceiving naturally at 44. Which was less than one percent. “So that obviously is ridiculous,” she told herself.

Then her friend casually dropped a bombshell: she’d recently had a vivid dream where she was pregnant - only to look down and realize she wasn’t in her own body. Danes explained that in the dream, her friend looked down and saw a distended belly and thought, ‘Oh, I’m—wait, this isn’t my torso. This is a long torso. This is Claire’s torso."

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Danes laughed, then went to dinner and had “two strong cocktails.” The next morning, she stopped at CVS. “It was just like bold cap locked,” she said. “Pregnant.”

She burst into tears. “That was deeply humbling,” she explained. “I realized, oh, I am not authoring this thing. This is the illusion that I’m driving this.”

She decided to surrender to it, and something shifted. “This beautiful girl emerged,” Danes said. “She’s the best. None of it was up to me, and I’m just delighted.”

That said, it wasn’t seamless. “She was disruptive. We had to move. It was a thing,” Danes joked. “She really wanted to be here,” she said. “She’s psyched. She’s having a great time. Unequivocally into this living business.”