Christina Ricci admits she had ‘no bond’ with daughter Cleo, two, while filming Yellowjackets
‘Wednesday’ actor returned to work when her daughter was two months old
Christina Ricci has said the filming of her TV series Yellowjackets affected her relationship with her two-year-old daughter, Cleopatra.
The Wednesday actor, 44, said that she was often left upset when she returned home between filming because her daughter didn’t know her.
“Last year I was commuting back and forth to Vancouver for Yellowjackets. She didn’t know me. We had no bond. So that was very upsetting,” she told the actor Shannen Doherty on her podcast Let’s Be Clear.
Ricci, who played the original Wednesday Addams in the 1991 film The Addams Family and its 1993 sequel, shares her daughter with her husband, Mark Hampton. She also shares a son, Freddie, with her ex-husband James Heerdegen.
“My kids do not like it when I travel. When I’m away, I try to take my son with me as much as I can,” she said.
But Ricci said it can be expensive if she brings her family along with her while filming Yellowjackets, in which she plays one of a number of women who survived a plane crash while they were teenagers.
“If you’re a series regular, you have to pay for everything, so I can’t… every time I go up and down, I can’t pay for four people, four flights, you know, and the rooms that you would need and all… it’s just too expensive to travel with everybody all the time,” she explained.
While she said maintaining a work-life balance is difficult with her acting career, she tries to go home as much as possible while filming.
“I try to get back as often as I can,” said Ricci. “I think really the thing that I learnt, especially with my son, is mixing him into my work life. Why can’t he come for the weekend to a convention and see what it’s like?”
Ricci said she had similar issues when raising Freddie, and admitted he was never sleep trained because she had to return to work when he was an infant.
Ricci returned to work when Cleo was also two months old, to film Netflix’s Addams Family spin-off series Wednesday, in which she made a cameo as Nevermore Academy’s science teacher Marilyn Thornhill.
While Ricci said it was difficult to leave her child so early, she praised her husband Mark for being supportive.
“I went and shot Wednesday in Romania when [Cleo] was 2 months old, and Mark [took care of her] every single night all night long. Like I just slept and worked the next day, and it made such a huge difference.”
