Katherine Parkinson: 'I was so moved by Kay Mellor's script I got pregnant!'
When IT Crowd star Katherine Parkinson read the script of her new BBC1 drama In The Club, which follows a group of heavily pregnant women, she reckons it led her to getting pregnant!
"I was so moved by Kay Mellor's script, I got myself pregnant," laughed a heavily pregnant Katherine at the launch of In The Club, which also stars Jill Halfpenny, Will Mellor and Hermione Norris among others.
"Then when we started filming when I was eight weeks' gone, I was going through the hardest part of my pregnancy - I had loads of migraines under the lights and was feeling really quite rough. Everyone was very supportive."
Katherine plays a lesbian mum-to-be Kim, and she had plenty to contend while filming the drama in Leeds last winter, especially when her on-screen baby arrived.
"My screen baby emptied its bowels in the birthing pool!" she laughed. "But it had been a long day of filming so I was past caring.
"As for real-life, I'm on my second pregnancy this time around, so I'm much more complacent, and I'm looking up Google much less."
In The Club comes to BBC1 later this summer.
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Patrick McLennan is a London-based journalist and documentary maker who has worked as a writer, sub-editor, digital editor and TV producer in the UK and New Zealand. His CV includes spells as a news producer at the BBC and TVNZ, as well as web editor for Time Inc UK. He has produced TV news and entertainment features on personalities as diverse as Nick Cave, Tom Hardy, Clive James, Jodie Marsh and Kevin Bacon and he co-produced and directed The Ponds, which has screened in UK cinemas, BBC Four and is currently available on Netflix.
An entertainment writer with a diverse taste in TV and film, he lists Seinfeld, The Sopranos, The Chase, The Thick of It and Detectorists among his favourite shows, but steers well clear of most sci-fi.