Getting Sticky With: Claire Holt

Claire Holt is an actress, a marathon runner, and a self-proclaimed child wrangler. She is also a very bad liar. That’s a good thing.

Over the years, Claire has been refreshingly candid about her pregnancy experiences, which were… not great. Many of the routines that kept her feeling her best—running, the occasional margarita—were suddenly off the table. And when those freedoms finally returned after pregnancy, they came with an unexpected side dish: guilt.

Her perspective has since shifted. Guilt, she believes, should only show up when your actions are out of alignment with your values. How many times do you have to hear that you can’t pour from an empty cup before you believe it? (Editor’s note: We’ll let you know when we find out.)

Below, we spoke with Claire about career pivots—and how they led to her new creative project, Saint Sirène—why a (we’d like to use an expletive here but won’t, so let’s just say “blasé”) doctor ended up traumatizing her more than the miscarriage itself, and how refusing to change her personality to fit into a mold led to a beautiful, one-in-a-trillion relationship. Words by AnaMaria Glavan, Photos by Malafouris.

“I was shocked by how much it broke my heart” 

When I met Andy, I was hyper-focused on my career, but we very quickly decided that this was it. We were engaged within six months and started trying for kids very quickly. I remember first getting pregnant and shaking and crying because I was so happy. Both of us were in heaven. We thought, “How lucky! It was exactly what we always dreamed of.” 

I had a gynecologist who didn't deliver babies, so she only saw me the first few weeks before I had to find another OB. I went to a new doctor in LA and the heartbeat was quite low on the scan. He said, “Oh, it could go either way. Don’t put it on Facebook.” 

I was eight or nine weeks at this point and was sick to my stomach obviously. He was very blasé about it. Honestly, that was one of the most traumatic parts of the experience; to have someone be so casual about something that mattered so deeply to me was awful.

Obviously I didn’t go back to see him and I found another OB. Two weeks later, the baby had stopped growing and there was no heartbeat. My gynecologist was incredible and she held my hand through it all. I had the DNC and I couldn’t fathom how it could feel so terrible. I was shocked by how much it broke my heart. 

My husband was incredible and gave me so much grace. I didn’t feel ready to start trying again right away, but about five months after my miscarriage, it finally felt right to me. That’s when I got pregnant with my little Jamesy boy. It was the greatest thing to ever happen to me. 

But I was so anxious throughout the whole process. I’ve spoken about this on my blog before, how I’ve never really had an experience of being joyful in pregnancy—I feel robbed of that because of my miscarriage. It was a lovely, healthy pregnancy, and I’ve had three healthy pregnancies and three beautiful children since my miscarriage. 

Honesty is (always) the best policy 

I come from a really big family. My dad's one of 10, and I have over 40 first cousins on his side alone. I always thought I would have four kids, because I was one of four. Then I got older and I got my wits about me a little bit and I realized that's a lot of kids. I do think about having another child all the time because I love it so much. 

But I found pregnancy to be a huge challenge because I couldn’t do the things I physically rely on that help my mental health (running, working out, exercise in general). Especially with Ford, my youngest; I had COVID, I had pneumonia, I had sciatica, I couldn’t sleep. I caught every bug under the sun because I had these little toddlers at home. 

It was such a struggle for me… and I just can’t lie. I’m not good at bullshitting people. If you don’t like me saying that I hated being pregnant, I understand. If that is frustrating to hear, I’m sorry, but this was my personal experience. And it’s not helpful to anyone for me to lie. 

Particularly when I went through my miscarriage, I really related to people who told the truth about their experience; good, bad, or otherwise. So, I made a promise to myself that with pregnancy, breastfeeding, postpartum, all of it, I was always going to tell the truth. If someone didn’t like it, that’s their prerogative.

GRWM: Not-knowing-what-to-to-wear-for-four-trimesters edition 

When I was pregnant with James, I was so excited to go to one of those maternity shops and buy the stretchy jeans and the stretchy dresses. Very not fashion-forward maternity clothes, but clothes that made me feel pregnant, because I was so desperate for that experience after the loss.

With my subsequent pregnancies I was like, okay, let’s try to pull together a little bit of style here, but I just felt uncomfortable and outside of my body. That made it very hard for me to get dressed. I wanted to be that girl in the mesh top, and I tried, but that just wasn’t me.

Pregnancy and postpartum can feel foreign because it is a foreign body. It's not the body you've known for all of these years, and it can be a challenge to work through that. It's okay to say you don't feel good, or that you don't like your postpartum body, or that you don't feel comfortable. When it comes to style or how you view yourself, we're complex creatures. Motherhood is complex in and of itself. 

Guilt is unnecessary emotional cardio… unless you’re not aligned with your values 

There was this incredible ultramarathoner who was breastfeeding during a race and the comments were saying things like that's selfish, why are you doing that, why are you dragging your baby around? It's such a strange culture where people feel so comfortable having opinions about how other people live their lives.

Those opinions impacted me, too. Sometimes I'd think, oh my god, I'm training for two hours. My husband is at the sports games with the kids and here I am doing an hour run and an hour strength session. And then I remind myself that this makes me not just physically strong, but mentally.

What changed things for me in terms of how I felt about my body was totally shifting my mindset. Instead of focusing on how I looked, I started thinking about what my body could do. I threw away all of the thoughts like, “I want to fit into my jeans, I want a flat stomach, I don't want my skin to wrinkle.” I focused on: after having kids, can I run faster than I ever have in my life? Can I lift a 50-pound dumbbell? That was when I really started to find myself again. I stopped caring about how I looked.

The only reason I should feel guilt is if I’m acting in a way that isn't aligned with my values. So if I feel guilty because I'm exercising and I'm not with my kids, is that misaligned with my values? No. My values are to be healthy so I can be a better mom for my children. Should I feel guilty because I'm on a work trip and working really hard, is that misaligned with my values? No. I value working hard. I want to instill work ethic in my children and I want to show them that they can achieve things. When that feeling of guilt comes up, I ask myself if what I'm doing is actually misaligned with my values. If it's not, then that guilt doesn't belong there and I try to move on.

Life changes, and your dreams are allowed to change with it

I still haven't figured everything out career-wise, to be honest, but I do know that I'm really passionate about creating and challenging myself. I have a strong entrepreneurial spirit and I love to learn.

My career definitely doesn't look like what I thought it would, but I've never had more fun than I am right now building Saint Sirène. It makes me so happy. We've hit speed bumps and worked through them, and it's been this beautiful experience because I feel really in control. As an actor, I never felt in control of my life. I loved it and had an amazing time, but I was always beholden to a schedule or a location or a contract.

You show up when you're sick, you miss birthdays, there's a schedule you have to follow. And once I had kids, that became really challenging for me. I didn't want to miss their birthdays. Of course sometimes people have to do that, but for me I wanted to see if I could pivot and still fulfill that creative drive while building something that worked with my family.

I went back and forth for a long time. Part of my ego felt like I hadn't gotten to where I wanted to be in acting or that I still had more in me, but over the last few years, I've worked on letting that go and focusing on building a life that fits my family and our dynamic perfectly.

Everyone seeks validation! Editor’s note: Unless you’re Elle

My husband put the kids to bed and I was online with Maddy, my business partner, selecting models for an e-commerce shoot. They were all so, so beautiful, but two of them looked too similar and we had to pick one. My whole life I determined my value based on whether I got a job or was picked for something. At that moment, I realized that sometimes it has nothing to do with you. It was really healing. 

I’ve also changed what success means to me. Success now is sitting in my backyard watching my kids play in the sprinkler, holding my husband’s hand, and feeling blissfully happy with this beautiful family that I have. It has nothing to do with how much money I have in my bank account, how many followers I have, how many movies I’ve done, or any of the metrics I used to measure success.

I remember listening to someone talk about this idea of the thing you want. Is it the house in the south of France? Is it a certain amount of money in your bank account? Is it a job title? Access the feeling of having that thing. What does that feel like? Maybe you feel happy, inspired, relaxed, successful. If you can access that feeling right now, then do you really need that thing? The ego is the part that wants it so other people can see it. It’s a cool way to think about why we attach success or our value to certain things, when we actually get to decide how we feel at any given moment.

And listen, almost all of us seek validation in some way. (Maybe there are outliers; my daughter might be one of them. She does whatever she wants and marches to the beat of her own drum.)  The tricky part is that validation only lasts for a few minutes. Then there’s another milestone, another thing to prove.

“The reality is, the right person will love you exactly as you are” 

A mistake I made when I was younger was trying to change who I was to fit the mold of what I thought someone else wanted. The reality is, the right person will love you exactly as you are. When I met Andy, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t change who I was at my core. 

I really think we're soulmates. I knew he would be a  great dad and that was really important to me. He's my one in eight billion, or however many people there are on this earth. He really is. I didn't want to see it in the beginning because I wasn't ready for that. But it was like fireworks, like an explosion right in front of me. I couldn't deny it. We've been together since 2017 now, so about nine years, and I still feel exactly the same way about him. He's the best guy I know. 

It’s important that our relationship becomes a north star for my children; they absorb everything. I'm super conscious about the way I speak about myself as a result. There have been so many times that I have heard James or Elle repeat something that we've said or done or seen. They take everything in, so I really try, without sending myself absolutely insane, to be aware of it. I try to speak to myself how I want them to speak to themselves. They'll mess up and they'll make mistakes. I think the other thing that was really important to me is teaching them that they can handle failure. They can handle discomfort. That's the most important thing.