The 'Yellowjackets' star shared how hard it is to bond with her kids when she's commuting from sets.
Christina Ricci is sharing how her time filming Yellowjackets affected her relationship with her daughter, Cleopatra, who turned 2 in December.
On the latest episode of the Let's Be Clear With Shannen Doherty podcast, the 44-year-old actress explained that in order to film the hit thriller series, she had to commute between her home and Vancouver, which put a strain on her time to bond with her growing child.
"Last year I was commuting back and forth to Vancouver for Yellowjackets. She didn't know me. We had no bond. So that was very upsetting," she told host Shannen Doherty.
The Yellowjackets star shares Cleo with husband Mark Hampton, and is also mom to 8-year-old son Freddie with ex-husband James Heerdegen.
"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," she added, noting that taking work trips with her entire family can get pricey. "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."
The mom of two shared how she tries to "manage" having a work-life balance to the best of her abilities. "I try to get back as often as I can," she said. "I think really the thing that I learned, especially with my son, is mixing him into my work life. Why can't he come for the weekend to a convention and see what it's like?"
Ricci reflected on how different it was to spend time with her son, Freddie, when he was younger.
"There are certain things like my son was never sleep trained because I had to go back to work when he was 2 months old," she said. Ricci claimed that her ex-husband "wouldn't help me at all with anything" and recalled having Freddie sleep in the same bed with her "just to get enough sleep to be able to work the next day."
Parenting with Hampton is an entirely different experience, Ricci says. "I went and shot Wednesday in Romania when [Cleo] 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," she recounted. "It was so much easier this time around. You know, you have to have a good, supportive partner."
In the same episode, Ricci recalled facing financial hardship and negative feelings about her appearance over the years.
"I've gone through periods as an adult where we were really, really broke," Ricci shared. "You just have that thing of, 'I don't ever want to feel this way ever again.' It's like this visceral feeling. I don't ever want to feel this helpless, because I think that's what not having a lot of money makes you feel like. You feel very helpless."
The Wednesday actress noted, "There's a ton of that pressure and it's hard. You have to work to support your family, but at the same time, you working takes away time from your family. So yeah, it's difficult but I'm in a really good place now. Again, I have a really supportive husband."
Ricci also spoke to how she became insecure about her looks while doing press for Yellowjackets.
"When I started doing press for Yellowjackets and having to post on social media images of myself, just even as somebody over 40, I had a really hard time," she admitted. "I had a really hard time seeing these images. I had a really hard time reposting them. I really couldn't reconcile caring about what I looked like so much. ...It was so hard for me."
Ricci added, "But we have to find ways to navigate it where it doesn't emotionally drag us down."
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