Who is Zach Gilford’s estranged wife? All about the family as actor recalls missing birth of son while filming Midnight Mass

Actor Zach Gilford offered a rare insight into the circumstances surrounding the birth of his son during his appearance on The Julia Cunningham Show. The actor recalled he was filming Netflix’s Midnight Mass amid strict restrictions when his son was born during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gilford said,

“It was during the pandemic we shot it. I had to miss the birth of my son to shoot it, so I was in the head space of, ‘I suck. I don’t want to be here.’”

Back in 2012, Gilford married actress Kiele Sanchez, who is known for appearing in Lost. According to TMZ, Gilford and Sanchez are parents to two children — a daughter, Zeppelin, born in 2017 and son Revel, 4.

In April 2025, Gilford filed for a divorce from Sanchez, citing “irreconcilable differences,” as per TMZ, which obtained a copy of the filing. The news outlet also notes that Gilford has filed for obtaining joint physical and legal custody of his children along with his estranged spouse, and the actor will be offering spousal support to Sanchez.

Zach Gilford’s relationship with his estranged wife, explored

Zach Gilford and Kiele Sanchez met while filming a television pilot, The Matadors, in 2010, as per People. The publication also reported that Sanchez, who is six years older than Gilford, got engaged in 2011. The couple married a year later.

In 2024, Gilford and Sanchez starred together in Criminal Minds: Evolution, portraying a married couple. Gilford, who played a serial killer in the series, recounted the experience of filming alongside his spouse during a conversation with US Weekly. He said about the process,

“It’s actually harder. It’s harder because I don’t want to hold a gun to my wife’s head… It just happened to be that the nature of these scenes were pretty gross.”

Speaking about balancing being partners and co-workers on set, Gilford told US Weekly,

“We’ve worked together several times and in very different situations. But there’s a theme on set when you are coworkers but also a married couple. It’s kind of trying to walk that tightrope… There’s times where I want to [support her]. Like if she’s having a discussion [with a director or a writer], I want to be like, ‘Yeah, Kiele is right!’ But that’s not my place. Kiele can talk for herself — she’s a very strong woman.”

Zach Gilford and Kiele Sanchez lost their first child

Roughly three years after the couple got married, Sanchez lost her pregnancy. The actress recounted her ordeal in a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter a year later and wrote,

“It was a few weeks after losing my pregnancy. A few weeks after giving birth to him. My son, Winter…I couldn’t imagine it. The amount of pain I felt consumed me. Every day it bit at me. Chewed on me. Swallowed me. I felt heavy and hollow.”

Sanchez also reminisced that when she lost her pregnancy, she was playing the character of Lisa on Kingdom, who also faced the same experience as the actress. Sanchez wrote for The Hollywood Reporter,

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“My first day: Lisa loses the pregnancy. I really hadn’t thought it through. And there I was, on autopilot. I couldn’t look at people’s faces. It wasn’t until I saw the prosthetic stomach I was going to have to wear that I started to buckle… I’m pregnant again. It was all a bad dream. A bad dream I was going to have to preform again and again until we ‘got it.’”

However, Sanchez recalled that playing a character dealing with the grief of losing her unborn child helped her work through her own pain, an experience she described as “cathartic”.

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