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5th Feb: Echo Chamber Season 1 blooper reel on Youtube here
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Bet you can't guess what's behind the plant.
Nowadays, when an actress gets 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, it doesn't fit with the storyline, 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 normally wears 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.
Alternatively, the character might just be written to put on a lot of weight, due to a sudden "eating binge" or whatever (see "Frasier" below). 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
- The Big Steal took extra long to film due to Robert Mitchum's stint in jail for marijuana possession in the middle of production. His pregnant co-star, Jane Greer, is visibly thicker in the waist in the last scenes shot while Mitchum himself is thinner due to life on a prison farm.
- In the original British version of Death at a Funeral, Keeley Hawes underwent various stages of pregnancy throughout filming. The last scene in the film with her has her sit down on a sofa where her in-film (and real-life) husband is lying down, whereupon he quickly hides her belly by putting his legs across her lap.
- In Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Helena Bonham-Carter filmed her earliest scene while pregnant, where her bump was very poorly hidden by a huge leather belt. It was so blatant that some people were wondering if Voldemort really does have mad game with the bitches.
- Shirley Jones was discovered to be pregnant during the filming of the 1962 movie The Music Man; her costumes were designed to hide that fact. In an interview, it is pointed out that if you look very closely during certain scenes, you can see the bump.
- 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.
- Claudia Black was very obviously pregnant by the time filming began on the movie Stargate Continuum, and there was no way to convincingly hide it even in the opening scene, where she's carrying a big sci-fi gun and wearing a loose camouflage fatigue jacket. Similarly to her role in SG-1 Season 9, she vanished (literally, due to Ba'al's temporal manipulations, then showed up again in the altered time line as the System Lord Qetesh, wearing a too-large dress and usually having the direct line of sight to her stomach blocked by different objects or shooting angles.
- Veronica Lake was pregnant at the start of the filming of Sullivan's Travels, but her character wasn't. Fortunately, as she was playing a hobo, she could convincingly wear loose, baggy clothes. The rest of the time, the greatest costume designer in Hollywood was hard at work making her look completely innocuous.
- The Swinging Cheerleaders a 70s exploitation comedy, averted this. Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith neglected to tell anybody involved with the production that she was five months pregnant. Never mind that her part called for several topless scenes, and that her character was a virgin.
- Penelope Cruz became pregnant during the filming of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, so her sister (also an actress) acted as her stand-in during some of the more action-heavy scenes.
- Averted in Fido. Carrie-Anne Moss's real life pregnancy was written into the film, where her character mentions being pregnant, and the husband commenting that he can't afford to pay for another funeral.
- In Legally Blonde 2, they filmed an introductory scene some time after the main shooting was completed. At that point Reese Witherspoon was obviously pregnant, so the scene consists of women sitting and talking, shot only from the chest up. It's pretty awkward and obvious.
- About midway through the film production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita, Madonna discovered that she was pregnant with her first child. The film directors went to great lengths to cover up the possibility of her "Eva Peron" getting pregnant, even if it meant removing some scenes of her being carried out of the church for fear she might slip.
- Catherine Zeta-Jones during Chicago, that's why she never shows her stomach.
Literature
- In But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, Lorelei abandons her movie career at expectant motherhood, alluding to the example of a movie actress who was discovered to be pregnant halfway through filming, which got to the point where her scenes had to be filmed "showing nothing but her head sticking up over the top of a bush or looking out of a window."
- A rare in-universe example is featured in Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close. One of the "rules" that Oskar's grandparents made was to never have children, but his grandmother felt she was losing him, so she made a pregnancy happen anyway and hid it with baggy clothing and pillows. Still didn't stop him from leaving.
Live Action TV
Music Videos
- In Annie Lennox's "Love Song For A Vampire," she was sitting down and wearing an Empire-style dress throughout.
- Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)" mostly has her in slimming outfits. Plus, the video has so much going on that you don't have time to check for a bun in the oven unless you know it's there.
- Averted by T-Boz from TLC in the video for "Tight to Death," her duet with then-husband Mack-10, where her pregnancy is proudly emphasized. A rather warming scene shows the hardcore rapper putting an ear to his wife's belly (it was only a year later that she divorced him amid threats of domestic violence, but it's still a nice video).
- In Madonna's video for "Music," she had to be shot from the front and almost always sitting down. She also commissioned a short action sequences from her favorite animation studio, to replace scenes she couldn't do. However, it was no secret that she was pregnant at the time, and it added a bit of subtext to the line "I want to dance with my baby."
- In Whitney Houston's video for her cover of "I Will Always Love You," she is shown sitting in a chair on a stage as she sings. Since it was a Video Full Of Film Clips from her movie The Bodyguard, this was easily done.
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