While many mothers go through a bit of depression immediately after giving birth, Essence Atkins managed to avoid the slump by going into post-partum acting just six weeks after her son, Varro, was born. The actress recently told EURweb that she was contacted for a role in The Haunted House by Marlon Wayans weeks after welcoming her son into the world on Christmas Day.
“When they called, literally, my son was 22 days old,” said Atkins. “I was like, ‘Marlon wants to meet with me.’ I was curious and I couldn’t say no. So I went and I had a meeting with them about this movie. We talked, we worked on it, and we had this great meeting and I left and I was like, oh that was fun. Then two weeks later I get this phone call and they were like, ‘We saw a lot of people and we really want you to do it but are you post-partum? We know you just had a baby, are you going to bust a stitch?'”
Although Essence performed most of the stunts in the movie herself, Marlon and the stunt coordinator had four doubles on guard and went through the action scenes slowly to ensure that the new mom wasn’t doing too much. “They made sure I was safe. They took good care of me,” said Atkins. “We had a great stunt coordinator who just made sure everything was OK; and tried everything out really slowly, and had patience and was very gentle with me. But it made me feel invincible. I felt like I could do anything. I don’t know if going through 40 hours of labor does that to a person, but I think that may have been a byproduct of just having had a kid.”
A Haunted House is available for public viewing at local movie theaters throughout the nation. Varro,1, is Essence and husband Jaime Mendez’s first child together.
Photo: Eurweb/Globalgrind
