Amy Schumer has always been willing to get candid about her personal life. Now, the 39-year-old comedian and actress is giving fans an even closer look at her complicated pregnancy journey, marriage and career in her HBO Max three-part docuseries, Expecting Amy.
Speaking with Rachel Smith, Schumer, who recently partnered with Tampax, explained why she wanted to share these intimate moments with viewers, as well as the hardships she went through while filming and what she learned about herself.
“I feel like people relate to me and I wanna be as open as possible so that I can help women feel better about themselves,” Schumer explained. “Because we all go through [so much]. [We] get our periods, we all [go through] all this stuff that we’re not supposed to talk about. And with a pregnancy, we’re supposed to make it look easy and I just really reject that, so I wanted people to hopefully feel better and educate other women about what might happen if they get pregnant.”
Schumer and husband Chris Fischer welcomed son Gene last May. During her pregnancy, the I Feel Pretty star suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, a severe pregnancy side effect, which she says made her feel like she had food poisoning for nine months. While pregnant, she told ET she also experienced “every mother’s worst nightmare.”
“One of the hardest moments, I think, of my whole pregnancy, was when the doctor asked us to turn the camera off — and that’s every mother and parent’s worst nightmare, is finding out that something’s wrong,” Schumer shared. “The whole time they thought something was wrong with his kidneys. But there’s that scene in the hospital after they do an ultrasound they go, ‘His kidneys are fine,’ and we were like, ‘What?!’ Like, that didn’t even seem like a possibility…But he’s totally healthy and we’re so grateful.”
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Expecting Amy also shows honest, and sometimes uncomfortable, conversations that she and Fischer have had, including her asking him if she can joke and talk about their marriage in her standup routines. Schumer said that it was a real conversation that they had and wanted to include in the documentary.
“We have a couple fights in this movie,” she admitted. “We really wanted to include it all, because what couple doesn’t have these struggles? But we have different struggles. Him being diagnosed with autism while we were filming, while I was pregnant, we wanted to share every aspect and not try and make ourselves look better than we really are.”
While she’s “not necessarily proud of every moment that’s in this documentary,” Schumer noted that “it’s really interesting to film yourself fighting. Every couple should do that, because you learn a lot.”
“I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I’m so right,’ and then I watch it and I’m like, ooh, I really could’ve been a lot better in that moment,” she continued. “In terms of sharing my standup and talking about my relationship, it was something for him to adjust to and I still, of course, ask him, ‘Is this OK?’ and he’s just like, ‘Yeah, share it all.’ But it takes some adjusting to having your partner, like, the next day, share intimate details of your marriage.”
Schumer, meanwhile, is loving being able to “spend extra time with my family” during coronavirus shutdowns, and feels “lucky to have the time to be with” them. She and her chef hubby are also having a blast filming their self-shot cooking series, Amy Schumer Learns to Cook star, which got renewed for a second season.
And while she and Fischer hope to expand their family one day — in January, Schumer revealed that she was undergoing in vitro fertilization — she shared that they are going to put “trying to increase our family on hold” for the time being. “Just with everything going on, like a pandemic, it just, to me, doesn’t feel like the time that I wanna be thrusting myself or anyone else in a medical environment if we can avoid it.”
In the meantime, she’s looking forward to educating women about their menstrual system with Tampax and helping to “take the shame and the myths away from women’s periods.”
“There’s so little education about it and there’s so much stigma [around how] we’re not supposed to talk about it,” she explained. “They only require sex education classes in 29 states, and only 22 of those states require any sort of medical confirmation…So I am just really excited to have this opportunity to try and educate women and just try to take some of the shame out of our period.”
