Jessica Brown Findlay is a doting mother to twin sons whom she welcomed via IVF with her husband Ziggy Heath in November 2022.
While she tends to protect their privacy, refusing to reveal their names, the Downton Abbey star made a rare motherhood confession in an interview with HELLO!.
© ITVThe actress, who is starring in the upcoming psychological thriller Playing Nice, confessed she "freaked out" over the plotline of the movie, which follows two couples who discover that their toddlers were switched at birth.
Fiercely protective, Jessica said that had she been put in a similar situation in real life, she would not hesitate to "fight tooth and nail" for her boys, now two, who are her "carbon copy."
© Joss Barratt"When I read the script, our sons were six months old and still little babbly babies. I told my husband that if someone pointed at one of our children and said that they weren’t actually ours, I’d be like: 'I don’t care.' I would fight tooth and nail.
"But in that moment, forgetting that you would have a child who wasn’t yours, that really freaks me out. There are certain truths that, once you discover them, you can never unknow them, and that in itself, let alone forming connections with other children, would blow your mind. It really freaked me out."
In preparation for her role, her research did nothing to calm her nerves about her own real-life journey to motherhood. "I looked into [baby] swapping and fell down a bit of a rabbit hole of wrong embryos being used or transferred into people during IVF, which really freaked me out.
"Our boys were born via IVF, but they’re 100% related to us. They’re like carbon copies of us."
IVF journey
© GettyIn March 2022, Jessica opened up to her followers about her fertility struggles to mark International Women's Day. She revealed she had undergone four rounds of fertility treatment alongside a video of herself taking hormone injections.
"Happy International Women's Day! We do hard things and then go dancing x.
© Instagram"IVF has made me even more aware of just how much women are capable of and what we can achieve whilst going through pain and heartbreak. Your body is not the enemy. Love it. No matter what. Sending love and support to every woman I have ever met and all the ones I haven't but know what this is."
Opening up about trying to conceive for three years, she had nothing but praise for Ziggy, whom she married in September 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic.
© Instagram"It was a lot to go through as a couple, but it was a loving and generous time. We couldn’t control everything about the process, but we did have it in our power to keep talking to each other and have empathy for each other," she told You magazine.
Recalling the moment they discovered they were expecting twins, she added: "We’d always wanted a big family, so now we were looking at each other, in hysterical laughter, crying with joy. It was heaven."
