Vanessa Kirby couldn’t have predicted that being fake pregnant in The Fantastic Four: First Steps was actually more difficult than her pregnancy in real life.
The actress, who plays Sue Storm in the new superhero pic, is currently expecting her first child with her boyfriend, Paul Rabil. She recently made an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, where she shared the difference between having a fake bump in the movie and her real one.
After greeting her on the stage, host Seth Meyers quipped about her current bump, “Oh, my God, it’s so cool that you stayed in character.”
“I honestly think a lot of people think it’s a stunt of some kind. It’s just crazy timing,” Kirby said of her real-life pregnancy. She then detailed how they created her on-screen pregnancy, adding, “Essentially, the fake belly is like a foam thing. When it’s a foam, it feels very light and a bit silly. So I kept saying to Flick, who looks after my costume, ‘I want more. It needs to be heavier.’”
However, the actress quickly regretted that request. “So we would try all these different things and eventually she kind of put heavy rice packets in the belly and it got so heavy, [and] I got really bad backache,” she recalled.
Kirby’s now several months into her real pregnancy and realized her fake bump in the movie was “nothing like this. This is … way lighter. So, I gave myself backache for no reason at all.”
Meyers joked in response, “Maybe you’re on to something, which is like before you get pregnant, do something worse.” The actress added, “That’s true.”
The Crown star also noted that after carrying the “heavy, heavy loads of rice” for a while, she eventually got to the point where she was like, “Should we take some of these out? Because I was going, ‘Oh,’ all the time.”
The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which hits theaters on Friday, also stars Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Ralph Ineson and Julia Garner.