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Courteney Cox, Kerry Washington, and More Actresses Who Had To Hide Their Baby Bumps for On-Screen Roles

Have you ever noticed a female lead character’s weight fluctuating in a season of your favorite show? There’s a good chance it’s because she was pregnant in real life, but it wasn’t part of her on-screen story. Stars like Courteney Cox and Kerry Washington had to hide their growing baby bumps for several episodes on their series, and they’re not the only ones!

For Courteney, writing her pregnancy into the storyline for her iconic role as Monica Geller-Bing was out of the question because by the time she got pregnant in real life, her on-screen character had already found out that she was infertile and had opted for adoption. Instead of reversing the storyline on the show, Courteney just hid her baby bump — while she was pregnant with her now-12-year-old daughter Coco Arquette — with loose-fitting clothes, but it was still detectable in some scenes.

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Courteney Cox was pregnant with her daughter in 2004, but she had to hide her bump on the set of Friends.

Kerry had to film five episodes of her hit ABC series Scandal while she was pregnant with her second child, five-month-old son Caleb Kelechi Asomugha. Show creator Shonda Rhimes didn’t want to write Kerry’s pregnancy into her role as political fixer Oliva Pope, so wardrobe was faced with the task of hiding her bump behind coats and blazers.

“You could play a really fun game for the first…five episodes of ‘find the bump,'” Kerry said during an interview with Good Morning America earlier this year. “After that, the bump is gone, cause we shot five episodes before I…gave birth.”

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Click through the gallery to see all the actresses who had to hide their pregnancies for on-screen roles!