As she threw up out of a car in the middle of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, Alexandra Daddario wondered if she should just get her pregnancy announcement over with. She’d kept the whole thing quiet for six months—wearing baggy clothing, posting tightly cropped photos on her Instagram, and avoiding pretty much everyone. But, as horns blared and people shouted at her to get out of the road, she realised the logical conclusion of not telling people you’re pregnant is…no one knows you are pregnant. Instead: “They just thought I was drunk,” Daddario says.
The incident didn’t make it to Deuxmoi or anything. (”Another reason I’m glad I’m not more famous,” she adds.) But the actor took it as a sign that it might be time to make the news public. There’s only so much an oversized shirt can do anyway, and one day, someone, somewhere, with an iPhone was going to figure it out. “I want to be able to not have to hide and have someone print a photo of me eating a bagel at the bodega,” she says.
So instead she’s telling me and my recorder in her Dumbo loft, where she lives with her husband, film producer Andrew Form. Daddario’s just finished taking photographs in Khaite and Phoebe Philo—her first real experiment with maternity style. Until recently, she’s been shooting the second season of AMC’s Mayfair Witches in New Orleans, wearing “whatever my character was wearing.”
Her castmates on the show quickly figured out she was expecting as she had extreme morning sickness. “I was on set, and I was throwing up and having make-out scenes with my costars right after,” Daddario tells me. “By week five, I was like, There’s no way I’m going to be able to hide this.”
Admittedly, she wasn’t doing the best job of hiding it anyway. When someone asked if she wanted a turkey sandwich, Daddario told the crew she couldn’t have deli meats. Her costar Ben Feldman asked if she was pregnant. When she attempted to be nonchalant about it, he responded: “Well, why are you announcing no deli meat?”
A fair point. So Daddario fessed up. Plus: “I was like, If I tell my job that I’m pregnant, I’m going to get a lot of time off to go throw up in peace,” she says. Did it work? “No,” she responds, laughing. “[However] I have wonderful costars who have kids, and everyone was very understanding about making out with a nauseous, vomiting girl.”
But no one understood more than the anonymous users of Reddit. At first, she logged on to lurk on mom message boards, scrolling posts that discussed severe nausea. Now, she reads it for just about everything: “I’m like, Should I be doing Solidcore at 14 weeks? Better check with Reddit on this.” She also became an obsessive reader of studies: After finding several that said prenatal yoga leads to an easier birth, she’s now an active practitioner.
She laughs through many stories she tells me, with most taking the form of humorous anecdotes. Until they don’t: “I feel like now that I’m pregnant and it’s all successful and everything’s healthy, I shouldn’t complain,” Daddario says, her smile wavering. She wants me to know she’s overjoyed with being pregnant. Which is something she didn’t allow herself to feel for a very long time: “Well, I had been pregnant,” she says before trailing off. Then, “I had loss.”
“It’s long and complicated, so I don’t want to be too specific,” she says softly. “Those kinds of losses and trauma are very hard to explain unless you’ve been through them. I really relate to all the women who have been through those kinds of things in a way that I didn’t understand fully before. It’s very, very painful.” Morning sickness and yoga, I realize, were likely far from the only topics she was searching about anonymously.
When Daddario found out she was pregnant again, sure, she was excited. But she was a lot of other things too: “It was actually quite hard to process,” she says. “You have a lot of complicated feelings.”
Work was both a stressor and a savior. “I was so overwhelmed with work. Part of me was like, This is the worst thing ever. Then part of me was like, This is actually a great distraction. Because I’m not sitting there all day long in my house going, If I pick up this pot to make pasta, is something bad going to happen? If I eat this pasta, is something bad going to happen?”
She looks back up. “What was the question again?”
By the time this comes out, Daddario and her husband will be out on the East End of Long Island, where her family has been going since she was a kid. I tell her I hope a tabloid or a gossip account doesn’t scoop us between now and then. She goes back to making self-deprecating jokes: “Or someone’s trying to take a photo of J.Lo in the Hamptons, and I’m in the background, and they’re like, ‘I think it’s that girl from The White Lotus, and she looks pregnant,’ then the Daily Mail picks it up.”
The baggy, stomach-hiding shirts aren’t coming with her. She’s picked up a bunch of cute dresses from Reformation and Goop, and she’s splurging on some pieces from Dior that she can wear afterward. “I’m finally embracing it,” Daddario says. “I can show it off.” It feels like she’s talking about something bigger than her bump.
Styling: Emma Morrison
Hair: Rebekah Forecast
Make-up: Caroline Dalí
Nail artist: Mo Qin
Visual editor: Olivia Horner
Senior art director: Parker Hubbard
This article was first published on Vogue.com.
