Claire Danes Felt Shame Over Being ‘So Old’ for Her Third Pregnancy

When Claire Danes hit her mid-40s, she thought it was no longer possible to get pregnant. At 44, the actress would be proven wrong.

In an episode of “the SmartLess” podcast, Danes, now 46, recalled how her family grew when she unexpectedly became pregnant two years earlier. At the time, Danes, best known for her roles in Romeo + Juliet and Homeland, already had two sons with her husband, actor Hugh Dancy.

The third child with Dancy, 50, was an “oopsy-daisy,” according to Danes. “I didn’t think it was possible, I was terrified,” she told the podcast hosts, labeling the entire experience as strange. “I was so old when it happened—I was 44,” she said.

For Danes, the news of her pregnancy not only brought feelings of excitement and surprise but also less positive sentiments. ”Suddenly, I felt a kind of funny shame,” she said, adding that she felt “naughty” at the time.

Danes described the emotions as akin to being “caught fornicating past the point I was meant to.” In fact, it was as though Danes “had discovered an edge I wasn’t quite conscious of, like I was going outside the parameters a little bit.”

Danes’s OB-GYN initially told her that her two sons, Cyrus, 12, and Rowan, 7, would be joined by a brother. But, in yet another twist, Danes was even “more delighted” to learn later that she was expecting her first daughter instead. “She’s pretty cool,” Danes said of her daughter, who she gave birth to on July 11, 2023, and whose name she has not publicly revealed. “She loves a tutu.”

Age differences between children can bring their own challenges. Danes referenced the 10-year age gap between her eldest and youngest as “kind of a trip.”

Danes most recently starred in The Beast in Me, a psychological thriller now on Netflix.