Christopher Abbott spoke publicly for the first time on May 18 about preparing to welcome a baby with Aubrey Plaza, and he did it with the kind of dry humor that has followed him from stage to screen. When Jenna Bush Hager began congratulating him on the pregnancy during his appearance on Today, Abbott smiled and said, “That’s very nice, thank you very much. It’s very exciting.”
He then joked, “I thought—for my Tony nom,” before adding, “I’m kidding, I know. There’s too much going on.” The aside landed because Abbott, 40, was also nominated for a Tony Award this year for his performance in Death of a Salesman, while Plaza is 41. His remarks were the first time he addressed the pregnancy in public after Plaza’s representative confirmed last month that the two were expecting.
For Plaza, the news fits a line of comments she has already made in public about family and motherhood. On the April 20 episode of the SmartLess podcast, she said she had always wanted to see what motherhood was like, calling it “so interesting” and saying, “I’ve always wanted to see what that’s all about.” In a 2023 interview, she spoke about family creativity and said, “I feel very much like there’s some kind of ancestral, generational thing going on, just in my DNA.” She added that many people in her family are creative, that she makes them proud, and that they helped raise her.
The two have known each other for years before their relationship became public. They costarred in the 2020 film Black Bear and appeared together again in the 2023 off-Broadway revival of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. In Black Bear, Plaza played filmmaker Allison, who is stuck in a lake house during a bout of writer’s block, while Abbott played Gabe, one of the married hosts Allison tries to manipulate in the film’s first section; in the second part, titled The Bear by the Boat House, he returns as director Gabe, who tortures her for his own project. That long professional history makes the pregnancy news feel less like a sudden reveal than the latest turn in a relationship that moved from set to stage to public view.
Abbott’s comments on Today also give the pair a quieter kind of timing. The pregnancy is no longer just a confirmed report; it is a family development they are now acknowledging in public, even if only in Abbott’s brief, joking way. For readers following Plaza’s next move, the answer to the headline is simple: yes, she is expecting, and Abbott has now said so himself.
