I have seen at least one case of an actress on a soap opera temporarily replaced by another actress while she was pregnant. That was Beth Ehlers on Guiding Light in the early 90’s. The other actress played the character for a few months, and then Beth returned after having the baby.
Since actors are frequently switched out on soaps, it’s not something that’s related specifically to pregnancy.
I’ve said this many times here before. (Although with a producer or some such making the point.)
Lisa Bonet got pregnant and disappeared fromA Different World. Quit? Fired? Contract bought out? who knows.
Actually it was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. They were pretty blase about it. Harriet (who was quite feisty in real life) reportedly said, “We sleep in the same bed at home, so why shouldn’t we sleep in the same bed on the show?”
Another example I can’t believe hasn’t been brought up yet – on How I Met Your Mother, they used a lot of props and loose clothing to initially cover up Alyoson Hannigan’s bump, then memorably shot a scene where she won a hot-dog eating contest to show the bump as is, then finally shot a scene where she got offended by a joke and literally didn’t show up for the next four weeks/episodes.
Clickbait to the rescue!
In addition to some of the people mentioned above, this articlementions at least four actors from General Hospital, Jamie Lynn Spears, and the scandal-of-its-time, Dana Plato, fired from Diff’rent Strokes because producers really didn’t want a storyline with a pregnant 16 year-old character.
Here are some clips of pregnant actors. Alyson Hannigan’s belly is #1.
The bolded part is frequently cited, but I swear I don’t remember any explanation being given. There was a big whoop about Peggy and Marcie being pregnant simultaneously. Then Peggy was absent for three episodes*, and when she came back, it seemed a reset button had been hit. No explanation, dream or otherwise. But perhaps it was a one-sentence reference that I didn’t catch.
*Including a two-part episode that was priceless. Kelly and her bimbette friends had a cable-access talk show that was picked up by a network (home of “Ellen and Her Dog,” “The Homeless Detective,” “Black Cop, White Girl,” “Me and the Shiksa,” and “Amos and Andrew”) then reformatted, then canceled. I wonder if those episodes had already been scheduled, or if Peggy’s absence made it possible to do a two-parter that focused on one of the kids instead of Al and Peg.
Sasha Alexander herself has stated that she quit because she hadn’t realized the workload that a 24-episode season entails. cite (Her subsequent series had shorter seasons with fewer episodes.)
Al wakes up in Al Bundy, Shoe Dick after dreaming that he sleuthed a big case and earned a big reward. After he’s told that, no, that never really happened, he asks if Bud has actually been trying to make it as a rapper named Grandmaster B (which also turns out to be a dream) and then starts to ask if Peg is actually pregnant, but of course gets interrupted by folks who fill-in-the-blank with “repulsed by you” and “disappointed, financially and sexually, by you”. But then, yeah, all that buildup ultimately leads to him asking whether she’s pregnant in the waking world.
According to this source, Tylo won a $4.8MM dollar jury award.
http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/9712/22/melrose.lawsuit/
The first pregnant woman on American TV was Lucille Ball - firing the star from the show would have been difficult (What were they going to do, call the show I Love Desi?) but up until that time pregnancy had always meant the actress lost her job. (This was an era when a married couple were, with rare exception, shown in separate beds with at least a nightstand in between). That was the first time a pregnancy was written into a show.
These days how a pregnancy is dealt with varies, even on the same show. As an example, on Lucifer the actress playing Mazikeen (Lesley-Ann Brandt) became pregnant and they did the whole loose-clothes/positioning, then the actress/character was absent from the program for part of a season. Then the actress who plays Dr. Martin (Rachel Harris) became pregnant and her pregnancy was written into the series and the resulting kid (fictional kid, not Harris’ actual kid) even became a major plot point.
It’s a reality that some characters aren’t very compatible with a real life pregnant - the Mazikeen, character, for example, engages in both very athletic fight scenes and tends to wear sexy/stripper/fetish clothing. Maybe a demon could do that, but human women have issues with that. On the other hand, Dr. Martin’s character is NOT that sort of gymnast-ninja and pregnancy is not incompatible with her normal activities.
On the flip side of that - Gal Godot did the reshoots for Wonder Woman while five months pregnant, with CGI used to edit out the bump and Gadot doing some quite athletic stuff while five months pregnant… but Godot is an incredibly fit woman who used to be a fitness instructor for the Israeli military so I would expect her to be an outlier. And a movie has the CGI budget to edit a baby bump out of scenes that TV series generally do not. And, again, Godot was the big star of the movie, a background/minor character is most likely going to be replaced, not CGI’d. In addition, apparently Godot did not find pregnancy disabling - which some women legitimately do, the effects of pregnancy being quite variable and also some pregnancies being complicated by medical issues.
Finally! Thank you.