Was Claire Danes really pregnant during the filming of Homeland? Here’s what you didn’t know

Homeland fans have asked this for years, and yes, Claire Danes really was pregnant while filming Homeland. The actress was pregnant during some of the show’s most intense and uncomfortable moments.

She certainly did not pretend, conceal it through camera tricks, or slow down the narrative. What she actually did was she went through the scenes that were not only very tiring physically but also emotionally heavy, and she did it while carrying a baby.

In fact, the situation behind the scenes was way more insane and intense than what is shown on the screen.

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Claire Danes was pregnant during Homeland Season 2 and it was not easy at all

Claire Danes was heavily pregnant while filming some of Homeland season two’s most demanding scenes, and she has been very open about how rough it actually was. Speaking during The Hollywood Reporter’s actress roundtable, Danes explained exactly what she was dealing with at the time.

She said she was pregnant during the second season and that the show kept getting more action-packed as her pregnancy progressed. While shooting, she found herself working in extreme conditions, including an old sewage factory, very late at night, while physically restrained.

Danes told The Hollywood Reporter that she was kidnapped, chained to a pipe, filming at 4 a.m., and seven and a half months pregnant when she finally thought, “This sucks.” She also openly discussed how uncomfortable filming intimate scenes was during this period. In the same roundtable conversation, she said,

“I had to do love scenes pregnant. That was really unpleasant.”

The pregnancy did not stay quiet either. Danes revealed that her baby was very lively during one of those scenes, and she humorously said that it seemed like her little boy was protesting on her husband's behalf.

When this happened, she was pregnant with her first child, Cyrus, whom she was going to have with her husband, Hugh Dancy. The baby was born in December 2012.

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How Claire Danes secretly filmed the show while hiding her pregnancy from everyone

While she was on The Howard Stern Show, Danes broke the news of her second pregnancy and stated that it was a planned one. She told Stern directly that she and Hugh Dancy had been wanting another kid for a while and that it finally happened.

Later that same day, during a visit to The Tonight Show, Danes explained to Jimmy Fallon that she had been filming Homeland during her first trimester without telling most people on set.

She told Fallon,

“I was filming during the first trimester which is kind of my least favorite phase because you just feel horrible.”

She added that it was especially hard because she could not explain why she felt so bad, saying,

“You feel just rotten and you’re not allowed to say why.”

She reiterated the same on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Exhaustion became her biggest issue. Danes admitted she kept falling asleep between takes, which led to one very memorable moment. While talking to Fallon, she recalled a particular event when she accidentally fell asleep on a crocheted bag. She said,

“I face-planted onto this crocheted bag in between takes. It was time for my close up … and I sit up and I have this crocheted indentation on the side of my face. It looked like I had third-degree burns.”

She explained that production had to stop while crew members massaged her face and used a blow dryer to fix it, which delayed filming by almost half an hour.

She also shared how strange it felt doing post-production work while pregnant. During an Additional Dialogue Recording session for Homeland, she said the intense breathing sounds upset the baby. Danes said,

“I just did a looping session and I was doing a lot of breathing and the baby did not like it. It’s like, ‘I need two things from you and you are not providing one central thing! Oxygen would be nice right about now!’ I was like, ‘This is hazardous to the life growing inside of me!’ ”

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Revisiting the memory, Claire Danes' pregnancy during the shooting of Homeland adds an entirely different dimension to the show. Indeed, she was pregnant for real, and yes, she continued to shoot without her pregnancy being obvious in the storyline.

It is very clear from her interviews in The Hollywood Reporter, The Howard Stern Show, and The Tonight Show that she found the whole thing very overwhelming. It is one of those little-known facts that make the whole experience of watching the show again more amazing.

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