'Downton Abbey' Actor Jessica Brown Findlay On Struggling To Find Work After Becoming Pregnant
Downton Abbey actor Jessica Brown Findlay has opened up about the struggle to find work as a pregnant woman.
The 33-year-old is expecting her first child child with her actor husband of two years Ziggy Heath, and recently told The Times: 'I hoped to work more this side of having babies.
'But you can’t. It is very hard to insure pregnant women on set, and since Covid it’s become even harder because you are considered even higher risk.'
The Flatshare actor highlighted that while there's been 'an amazing transformation' in film and television since the #MeToo movement, women are still discriminated against, particularly when they have children.
The star underwent IVF and marked International Women's Day on March 8 by posting a video of her injecting herself as part of the fertility process to her Instagram feed.
In an accompanying caption to the post, Findlay wrote: 'We do hard things and then go dancing. 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 heart break.
'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.'
The actor, who shot to fame as Lady Sybil Crawley in ITV's hit period drama Downton Abbey back in 2010, in which she starred for three seasons, later met her husband on the set of the period drama series Harlots.
In 2021, actor Jade Anouka wrote an op-ed for The Guardian in which she claimed that she'd lost a TV role due to her pregnancy.
'There is another prejudice infesting the industry, one that is kept in the shadows: pregnancy discrimination,' she wrote in the article before explaining that after informing her employers that she was pregnant she received an email from the production which included quotes from its insurers 'saying that the premium for a pregnant artist would be so high that the company would not cover it, and therefore they would be dropping me from the job'.
'Society depends on pregnant people to bring the next generation into the world, yet I felt so quickly expendable,' she added.
After speaking with representatives from the actors’ union, Equity, she was told that while legal action was a possibility, it seemed like the production company had legally executed the right course of action.
'If those at the top won’t even consider letting someone who is pregnant do their job, our industry will keep losing artists; talent bruised, battered and gone for ever,' she concluded her article.
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