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You know what’s hard? Pregnancy. I know this now because I am pregnant. And it’s hard.
I won’t go into the details, but I’ll just sat that the last thing I would like to do while pregnant is live the plot of a crime movie. Any crime movie.
And yet… I love when a woman in a crime movie (or TV show) is pregnant. I think it adds a fabulous dimension to a character, underscoring the absolute madness of what women have to go through (on bodily and emotional levels) and spotlighting their strength. On top of everything else that she has to do … she’s pregnant. Her body is mutinying against the physiological and hormonal norms she has lived with her entire life, to grow a human in it from scratch—at great cost and causing great pain.
I want to pay a little tribute to some of the badass pregnant women in crime fiction and TV. This is a little list, and no, Rosemary is not on it because that would make things way too complicated. I’ll write a Rosemary’s Baby piece one day, but it’s not this one.
Okay, here we go!
5. Helena Ayala, Traffic
Catherine Zeta-Jones was actually pregnant when she played Helena, a wealthy, pregnant housewife who she learns that her husband is a major drug distributor only when he’s arrested. She then negotiates how much she
4. Angela Burr, The Night Manager
I love Olivia Colman’s Angela, the desk-worker secret agent working to take down a dangerous international arms dealer. She’s so bloody determined, it’s inspiring.
3. Perfidia Beverly Hills, One Battle After Another
Teyana Taylor’s Perfida, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, is a revolutionary with the militant group French 75, who becomes pregnant with a baby girl. The film not only captures her experiences as a tough-as-nails pregnant woman who doesn’t let bodily details derail her mission, but also a woman struggling with postpartem symptoms and the normal difficulties of motherhood.
2. Kee, Children of Men
In Alfonso Cuarón‘s 2006 masterpiece, Clare-Hope Ashitey plays Kee, the first woman in the world to become pregnant in 18 years, meaning that she will potentially save humanity if she can deliver the child safely. She’s a refugee from Africa living in a dystopian world, meaning she already has a lot of crap to deal with before the pressure of carrying a child who might save humankind.
1. Marge Gunderson, Fargo
My mom always said that the only reason she could get through the edge-of-your-seat emotional rollercoaster of Fargo is pregnant Frances McDormand, even-keeled and rational and hard-working despite the exhaustion and cumbersomeness of being almost-to-term and despite that she has to mother everyone else in the movie, too. Marge, large and in charge, is the patron saint of all pregnant women.
