Aurora Starchild
Hilary Swank can do it all. The two-time Academy Award-winning actress once put on 19 lbs of muscle in 3 months for Million Dollar Baby. She knows how to fight. She can fly planes. But now she’s expecting twins and, to be fair, mommas need a break sometimes. Here’s how Swank hid her baby bump while filming Alaska Daily, the new show that earned the actress a Golden Globe nomination. (Hint: She pulled the Mom Card.)
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Hilary Swank Just Finished Filming Season 2 of Alaska Daily… While 6 Months Pregnant
“I feel like women are superheroes. What our bodies do. I have a whole newfound respect,” Swank told James Corden and Gwyneth Paltrow on The Late Show. She explained how her primary craving in the first 16 weeks was fruit. During her early pregnancy, her Alaska Daily co-stars didn’t know she was pregnant.
“One of my co-stars, when they found out I was pregnant, was like, ‘Oh! That’s why you eat 10 pomegranates a day and like, 50 pears.’” Her twins are due in April, coincidentally on the birthday of her late father.
Alaska Daily premiered in October 2022 with its second season set to return in February. Season 2 just finished filming less than two weeks ago. Hence, Hilary Swank had a massive baby bump while filming. Swank plays Eileen Fitzgerald, who she describes as an investigative “journalist who got canceled in New York City for a job she was reporting on.” Fitzgerald gets a job offer in Alaska and becomes involved in investigating the ongoing murders and disappearances of indigenous women.
“[It’s] a true epidemic… a horrific… Almost two women go missing in Alaska every week,” Swank said. “Never to be found. Never to be investigated. If that happened to a white person, a million dollars would be going into finding one person.”
Hilary Swank Pretended to Be Bad at Running So She Could Have a Stunt Double for Her Jogging Scenes
“How did you hide these two people growing in your body?” Corden asked Swank.
“They had a double that started doing the walking stuff. And then they would just, you know, shoot me like…” Swank trailed off as she used her hand to signal where the camera frame stopped just above her tummy.
“That’s my dream,” Corden quipped.
“Here’s the thing though, in my first trimester, for the first 12 weeks, no one knew I was pregnant,” Swank explained. “And we worked 15-hour days, it’s no joke — and the first trimester, you’re so tired. And my character was a jogger. That’s what she did for exercise all the time.”
Swank said it takes 2 hours to film 2 minutes of screen time because of all the angles and shots needed.
“You’ll be running for two hours,” she said. Of course, we know Swank of all people is normally capable of this but again, she’s pregnant with twins now. But she knew it would be too much. Yet at the same time, she didn’t want to tell anybody that she was pregnant yet.
“I was like, ‘You guys, I’m a really bad runner. I need a stunt double to run.’” She implied that the four men in charge proceeded to look sideways at her. Then they asked her to show them.
“I was like, okay, how do I look like a real bad runner. I’m not a great runner to start with. But I was like, okay, I’ve really got to sell this so that I get my stunt double. But I ran and these four men all looked at each other and went, ‘Yeah, you need a stunt double.’”
Swank added that the men tried to correct her at first, pointing out how she could improve her form. But she deftly swatted the comments away and got her double like a genius.
Hollywood Isn’t a Stranger to Hiding Pregnancies
Hilary Swank isn’t the only actress to hide her baby bump while pregnant. Sons of Anarchy actress Katey Sagal had a similar situation when she was pregnant on Married… with Children. Like Swank, Sagal had a baby bump to hide — on three different occasions.
With her first child, Ruby Jean, the show initially wrote Peggy Bundy’s pregnancy into the script. Ruby Jean tragically passed away and the show rewrote the pregnancy as a single-episode dream sequence. Sagal had two more children during the show’s decade-long run. For those, she was either filmed above her belly or made audio appearances while her character phoned in while “traveling.”
Gal Gadot was 5 months pregnant with her second daughter, Maya, while filming Wonder Woman. However, her pregnancy was hidden with a much different technique. Gadot told Entertainment Weekly (via W Magazine) that she needed to film reshoots of certain scenes and they used a combination of costume magic and CGI to hide her bump.
Wonder Woman is known for her skin-tight outfits, so this trick was achieved by putting a green screen-colored strip across her stomach.
“On close-up I looked very much like Wonder Woman,” said Gadot. “On wide shots, I looked very funny, like Wonder Woman pregnant with Kermit the Frog.”
