Christina Ricci Says She “Had No Bond” With Her Daughter While Filming Yellowjackets

When Christina Ricci was filming Yellowjackets, she was flying back and forth between Vancouver and her home in Los Angeles. All the time. And this had a serious side effect on her family. The mom of two admitted during a recent podcast interview that she did not bond with her daughter Cleopatra while working on Showtime’s popular series, which she found “very upsetting.”

Ricci sat down for a chat on Let’s Be Clear with Shannen Doherty recently, and talked about what it looks like to be a working mom who is filming out of state. “Last year I was commuting back and forth to Vancouver for Yellowjackets,” Ricci explained, noting that her daughter Cleopatra, who turned 2 in December, was not attaching to her mom at the time. “She didn’t know me. We had no bond. So that was very upsetting.”

Unfortunately for Ricci, who shares Cleo with husband Mark Hampton and is also mom to 9-year-old son Freddie with ex-husband James Heerdegen, the cost of trying to bring her whole family with her to set proved to be too much. “My kids do not like it when I travel. When I’m away, I try to take my son with me as much as I can,” the mom explained, adding that it was too expensive when she was filming Yellowjackets in Vancouver.

“If you’re a series regular, you have to pay for everything, so I can’t... every time I go up and down, I can’t pay for four people, four flights, you know, and the rooms that you would need and all...it’s just too expensive to travel with everybody all the time.”

While finding a work/life balance is a struggle for Ricci, she did admit that her husband has made things easier for her. “I went and shot Wednesday in Romania when she was 2 months old, and Mark did every single night all night long. Like I just slept and worked the next day, and it made such a huge difference. It was so much easier this time around. You know, you have to have a good supportive partner,” she admitted to Doherty.

So it seems she forgave him for choosing their daughter’s name without her. When little Cleopatra was born in December 2022, Ricci shared that her husband made a big name decision without her. “We were going to call her Cleo,” she told Ellen DeGeneres at the time. “I had a C-section and right before when they were preparing me they started talking about how we had to fill out birth certificate stuff my husband was like, ‘Well, we’re going to give her a full name right? And then her nickname is Cleo?’” She told him they could figure it out later, but he went ahead and decided on Cleopatra while she was in recovery.

To be fair to him, it’s a very cool name.