Greta Gerwig has reason to celebrate, and it’s not only her latest film finally hitting cinemas.
The Barbie director and husband Noah Baumbach, who co-wrote the highly anticipated comedy with her, quietly welcomed their second child four months ago. However, on Wednesday marked the first time either publicly discussed him or showed reporters a photo.
“He’s a little Schmoo,” Gerwig told Elle UK. “I don’t know if you can tell energy from the picture, but that’s very much his energy. The little guy is sleeping through the night. But I’m still doing that thing where I wake up, every hour to 90 minutes, and just hover.”
“You just keep wanting to look at the baby,” she added. “So I’m slightly in a twilight state.”
The baby has since joined Gerwig’s four-year-old son, Harold, and her 13-year-old stepson, Rohmer, whom Baumbach shares with ex-wife Jennifer Jason Leigh. Gerwig first revealed she was expecting on The Tonight Show in December — after nobody got the hint.
“I went to an event recently and I wore something that I thought everyone would be so interested to know that I was going have another child,” she told Jimmy Fallon. “And nobody cared. And it didn’t get reported on, which turns out nobody’s paying attention to you.”
That certainly changed after the first Barbie teaser arrived later that month.
The marketing campaign went into full effect with glimpses of lead actors Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, who have since served Barbie-inspired looks at every red carpet — and waxed poetic about the “Kenergy” that portraying a Mattel-created toy requires.
If the early reviews are right (and the Rotten Tomatoes score of 88% holds firm), Gerwig could soon be celebrating the biggest film of her career. While she claimed to be “properly middle-aged now” on the verge of her 40th birthday, Gerwig feels “extremely activated.”
“I want to start being more playfully outrageous,” she told Elle UK, recalling how fun it was to wear long nails and high heels during production. “I don’t want to be 80 and look back and say I could have really done it, from 40 to 60, but I chose to be practical!”
“But we will see how far I get with this,” she continued. “I’ll probably look back and say, ‘That was a really, an amazing time. And I don’t know how all of it was possible.’ But it’s filled with a lot of happiness.”
Barbie hits UK cinemas on Friday 21 July.