Hide Your Pregnancy - Television Tropes & Idioms

Bet you can't guess what's behind the plant.

Nowadays, when an actress falls pregnant, this event is usually written into the show as the character getting pregnant. However, sometimes the writers decide not to include the pregnancy, perhaps because it can't be written in convincingly, or perhaps it's just that Status Quo Is God. In this case, they commonly resort to various (ineffective) tricks to avoid the actress' bump being noticed, such as

The actress wears lots of loose, baggy clothes.
The sudden, unprecedented wearing of heavy overcoats etc. which are much too big for her, with absolutely no explanation— particularly for a character who would wear form-fitting clothes.
She carries lots of bags in front of her belly
She sits down a lot; in the late stages of pregnancy, this often entails some sort of blanket over herself to hide the bump. Such "supine shots" are filmed for prolonged periods, with no direct views of her ever actively getting up or sitting down.
The cameramen just make sure to never get shots below their upper chest.
The camera shoots her from far away if they need full body shots.
She suddenly wears black. Lots and lots of black... without a funeral (or Matrix) in sight.
The excessive use of body-doubles for all revealing body-shots with the face conspicuously obscured— after which the camera will flash conveniently back to the actress with her face showing and body obscured. (Naturally, this sad trick only makes the attempt at deception more obvious).
Worst of all, is the attempt of wearing high heels etc. to make her look more height-weight proportionate; this succeeds only in making her appear even more like "the elephant in the room" by towering over all else around her with her increased size. Even worse, when she walks, she typically becomes a lumbering hulk, lurching and teetering around on the heels like Frankenstein's Monster due to her increased height and decreased balance.

Naturally, all of these tricks leave her pregnancy about as "hidden" as a coalpile in a ballroom— particularly since the bodies of young actresses, often chosen for their in-shape figures, are normally displayed prominently for camera-effect before pregnancy; and so the sudden cover-ups become immediately conspicuous, when the formerly eye-catching physiques inexplicably "go missing" beneath these clear attempts to hide them.

Alternatively, the character might just put on a lot of weight for whatever reason.

Note that this trope does not include cases where the actress' pregnancy is written into the show - that's Reality Subtext.

Examples:

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Film

Live Action TV

Frasier: Jane Leeves got pregnant late in the show's run, and it was written as Daphne becoming fat. In the final season, the actress' second pregnancy was merely incorporated into the storyline.
In Coronation Street, a woman playing a post-op transsexual became pregnant; she started by sitting down a lot, and later went on holiday to keep things from getting too obvious.
Desperate Housewives got very creative with this, using everything from giant gingerbread castles to Mrs. McClusky's head to hide Marcia Cross's pregnancy. But when the plot really could not get away with this, they just called in a stunt double. One episode required Bree to climb a ladder, hiding the other actress's face.
Star Trek The Next Generation: When Gates McFadden (Dr Crusher) got pregnant in real life, her character had to go through this, with lots of close-ups or sitting down shots. It also helps that she wore a smock.
- Likewise, Roxanne Dawson (Lt. Torres) on Star Trek Voyager. The writers considered writing her pregnancy into the plot, but decided against it, resulting in a long period in which her character was never shown from the chest down and the big coat trick (except for a two part episode set in the holodeck where the character was forced into portraying a pregnant woman by aliens who had taken over the ship). Amusingly enough, her character later became pregnant.
- This troper has long been in awe of Ms. McFadden for doing her own stunt in the episode "Remember Me," where she hung down from the helm chair mounted on the wall in howling wind to simulate a space vortex trying to suck her sideways out of the bridge, while heavily pregnant.
  - If I remember my ST:TNG episode guide correctly, she wasn't heavily pregnant then — she found out within days of shooting that scene that she was pregnant.
Happened in The Nanny when the actress Lauren Lane, who played C.C Babcock, became pregnant (out of character as she's portrayed as being hopeless at attracting men). They even did some Lampshade Hanging with this one by having her carry a poster with "Baby" on it in front of her, and by making references to...
Elaine from Seinfeld
In The X-Files, Scully wore a lot of trenchcoats and stood behind a lot of desks while Gillian Anderson was pregnant. Then she got abducted by aliens while Gillian Anderson was giving birth (i.e. she was absent from that episode). Scully spent the next episode in a coma; by the next episode she was walking and talking again. Incidentally, Anderson's pregnancy precipitated the creation of the X-Files' legendary Myth Arc.
In the TV show Cheers, Shelly Long's pregnancy at one point resulted in Diane spending most of an episode lying under the floorboards of the bar, with only her face showing.
Newhart had Julia Duffy carry around a pillow for half a season.
Kate And Allie put Kate in a hospital bed with a foot injury.
- A later episode of Kate And Allie was told largely in flashback, during the time when Kate was pregnant with her daughter Emma.
All My Children had decided not to write in Sydney Penny's pregnancy, instead using only tight shots of Penny's face. This resulted in a very funny moment for her and Justin Bruening, when their two characters were arguing over whether to have a baby, while Penny was 8-1/2 months pregnant.
One of Lucille Ball's pregnancies was hidden during the very early episodes (possibly just the pilot?) of I Love Lucy.
They also had the actress of Sara Tancredi from Prison Break wearing flowy shirts, jackets, sitting down a lot to hide her pregnancy. They got rid of her by faking a decapitation until she was ready to come back.
Titus: Cynthia Watros was pregnant with twins during the second season, so her character Erin ended up breaking her leg and being a wheelchair for several episodes.
Law And Order Special Victims Unit: When Mariska Hargitay got pregnant, Olivia Benson held large folders in front of her, wore thick, hevay winter coats, and eventually temporarily left town on an undercover assignment for the FBI. At one point she held a coat in front of her while wearing a thick jacket. The overcoat in question wouldn't have been able to fit over the jacket she was wearing.
In Married With Children, Katey Segal became pregnant twice during the shows run, the first time in season 6 her character Peg actually was pregnant, it stayed for half a season, then it was retconned into a dream after she miscarried in real life, later on in season 9 or 10 during her second pregnancy her stomach was either obscured by an object or not always shown on screen.
In JAG, when actress Catherine Bell became pregnant, they appointed her character a judge, to allow her to sit behind a big judge desk. (Military judges don't wear robes)
While Diane Farr of NUMB3RS was pregnant, her character, FBI Agent Megan Reeves, was mostly limited to desk jobs.
When Traylor Howard got pregnant during the fourth season of Monk, she was usually filmed chest up in the usual way. However, in one episode her character Natalie is uncomfortable being around an old, obsessive boyfriend (played by Sean Astin!) and stuffs a pillow under her shirt so he'll think she's pregnant, allowing them to shoot her normally.
When Phylicia Rashad from The Cosby Show got pregnant, she had to stand behind various household objects, such as cereal boxes. One scene had her sitting down behind a gigantic teddy bear, strange as that may sound.
In the series finale of Six Feet Under, Brenda has just given birth to Willa, but the actress Rachel Griffiths was still pregnant. She carried a very large purse and wore baggy clothes.
When actress Anna Belknap, who plays Lindsay Monroe in CSI: New York became pregnant, they used the close-up method with varying success.
In the second half of The Office's fourth season, Angela Martin was strictly confined to her workspace behind a chest height wall due to her pregnancy.
How I Met Your Mother in Season 4. Alyson Hannigan's pregnancy resulted in the typical motions of baggy clothing and a lot of scenes behind things, and groundwork for a pregnancy storyline was even put in motion that would have provided an easy way around the whole issue. A perfect plan that was abandoned entirely, as Lily and Marshall decide to wait to have kids later in the same episode, and to top it off, a later episode features Lily in a hot-dog eating competition. The result? A visibly expanded stomach. The end of the pregnancy and birth was covered by Barney telling an incredibly dirty joke and Lily refuses to be around them for four weeks.
- Cobie Smulders, who plays Robin, is also pregnant. She is much taller than Hannigan, allowing her to hide it better. She does spend most of her time sitting down, though.
Doctor Who: This is why, in "The Five Doctors", Zoe is wearing a layer of bubblewrap over her clothes.
In the second season of Life, Sarah Shahi's pregnancy was utilized very well to further the story arc: Dani Reese goes off to interview for a job in the FBI, only to be used as a pawn by people in the conspiracy. This allows for the occasional chest-up shot of her while the rest of the cast is solving the mystery of the week.
Jamie Lynn Spears was pregnant for part of the shooting of the final season of Zoey101. She wore belts and baggy shirts until the end of the show.
Chyler Leigh's pregnancy in season five of "Greys Anatomy" was hidden in the classic manner. There was also one episode having her constantly eating because Mark and Derek were fighting.
At the beginning of season nine of Stargate SG-1, Amanda Tapping's pregnancy was avoided by having her character transferred temporarily to the R&D base at Area 51. Video communication involving her only showed her body from the shoulders up. Claudia Black also became pregnant with her first child at this time, and the writers solved this particular problem by shipping her off to the Ori galaxy and only having her show back up after she'd become impregnated with a Dark Messiah. And for a hat trick, Lexa Doig also became pregnant. Since she only held a minor supporting role, her character completely vanished from the show without explanation.
Charmed's Holly Marie Combs. The most blatant effort to hide her belly was the "headless horseman" episode.
Barbara Eden was pregs in the first episodes of I Dream Of Jeannie.
Tasmin Greig in Black Books, which is hidden not just by the normal techniques, but also because it looks like she's constantly smoking and drinking though the entire series.
On Leverage, Gina Bellman's stomach has been hidden (in the same episode!) by being in a coffin, oh, and HOLDING A BOMB TO HER STOMACH. At the end of the episode, she goes on a journey to "find herself"; the next episode, she's only present in phone calls from the main team, usually shot from the chest up behind a bar or in the back seat of a cab.
The Lawrence Welk Show did this whenever a female member of the cast became pregnant, which was quite often.
Subverted, or played with, on Angel; fans became increasingly annoyed with how the creators were trying to hide Charisma Carpenter's pregnancy, until her character's secret pregnancy became a plot twist.
Completely averted with Mythbusters' Kari Byron. Because of her pregnancy, she couldn't participate in the hangover myth. Didn't stop her from enjoying Grant and Tory's discomfiture way too much, though. She also exercised extra precautions when doing gun myths ^*
^{I didn't even know they made maternity bulletproof vests!}
:
Kari: Protecting for two!
Near the middle of Season 5 of The Drew Carey Show, Christa Miller suddenly started sitting/lying down a lot while covered up, or wearing baggy and/or black clothing that she never wore previously. Her pregnancy couldn't be written into the script because her character was just starting her romance with Drew. However, she did show up pregnant as a "gag" in Episode 19, "What's Wrong with this Epside III" since the character wasn't supposed to be pregnant. (Ryan Stiles also showed up pregnant as "Lewis—" except that Christa Miller's wasn't simply a basketball under her shirt, as her widened overall girth showed even from behind).
On Dallas, Victoria Principal was only shown either conspicuously absent, or sitting down with a table conveniently in front of her for much of the season, while she was filmed from the chest up.
During filming of the series Sex and The City,, Sarah Jessica Parker was pregnant several times in mid-season, which the producers tried to cover up using body-doubles, and otherwise using suddenly baggy clothes and avoidance-shots of her normally lean "butterface" body.
In Season 8 of King of Queens, Leah Remini, whose extremely-slim figure was shown center-screen as a ratings-device for most of the series, suddenly ballooned up to almost twice her original weight during pregnancy, (ironically, this was written out of the script by the Hollywoood sitcom-wizards who gave Carrie a miscarriage before she even started gaining weight). Even more ironically, her sudden blimping-out is never noticed or mentioned by anyone in the series, despite that 1) the original script made an entire episode-joke about how she had a family history of women gaining a lot of weight after age 30, and 2) the entire series was more or less a non-stop "running fat-joke" about Kevin James's weight-condition.
In Just Shoot Me, Laura San Giacomo's character is childless, but there is no attempt to hide the fact that her breasts miraculously grow and shrink, alternating greatly in size almost between episodes for no stated reason during the course of the series, despite that her size is often mentioned in jokes when it wasn't originally. She was also often filmed in concealing clothes and positions— except, naturally, for the humungous "side-boob" shots.
In Two and A Half Men, one of Charlie's former-girlfriends is shown as supposedly non-pregnant, despite that she's obviously at 8 months, draped utterly non-convincingly in a shawl which conceals nothing— particularly since her remaining clothing is skimpy at best, looking like she's smuggling a beach-ball. Later in the next season, she's shown at a much more modest weight— and as the new mother of a newborn infant which was written into the script, no less (but not because her character was supposed to be pregnant in her last appearance).
In the 1995 version of Pride And Prejudice, Susannah Harker (who played Jane Bingley) was pregnant with her first child during filming. However, the cut of the dresses and the period fashions made this much easier to obscure than in many other productions, not to mention the fact that a good portions of the scenes she's in involve her sitting down anyway.
In The Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Billie Piper was pregnant during the filming of the second series. Obviously a pregnancy couldn't be written in, so a body double was used for nude scenes and Belle began wearing baggy, unflattering dresses. It becomes quite intrusive when you know about it, as sex scenes involve tight closeups on her face, then shots of her body from the shoulders down.

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