Christina Ricci Was Secretly Pregnant Throughout All of Yellowjackets

Christina Ricci’s Emmy-nominated performance in the Showtime series Yellowjackets was met with universal praise. And as if her humanization of Misty, who survived a plane crash by resorting to cannibalism as a teen, weren’t impressive enough, it turns out the 42-year-old actor was doing her best to hide that she was pregnant for the length of the six-month shoot. The only ones who knew that she was carrying her second child were her costars Tawny Cypress, Juliette Lewis, and Melanie Lynskey, all of whom joined her in the conversation with the Hollywood Reporter in which she made the reveal.

“When we started, I was six weeks pregnant,” Ricci recalled. “It was difficult. There were so many times where I was like, ‘Ooh, when they find out I’m pregnant, and they made me sit in this smoky room all day. When they realize that they made me stand for eight hours, and I’m pregnant, and I have this horrible sciatica, and it’s 100 degrees, oh, they’re going to feel so bad.’” (They didn’t.) In the end, it was “fine”—though it would have gone even better if Misty weren’t a cold-hearted, manipulative misfit with no conscience whatsoever. “It would’ve been helpful if I was playing a more emotional character,” Ricci continued. “I can give a real good performance when I’m pregnant, real emo.”

Ricci evidently gives a real good performance at pretending not to be pregnant, too: She posted the below photo a month and a half after Yellowjackets wrapped.

It’s a good thing it all worked out timing-wise. We don’t even want to think about what Misty—who poisons and kidnaps people without a second thought—would be like as a mom had the writers incorporated Ricci’s pregnancy into the script.