Cobie Smulders & Kris Swanberg On ‘Unexpected,’ Elizabeth McGovern [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

Cobie Smulders stars in director Kris Swanberg‘s latest film, Unexpected, as an inner-city high school teacher who unexpectedly finds herself pregnant.

Cobie Smulders, Kris Swanberg On ‘Unexpected’

Smulders’ character Samantha Abbott and her boyfriend John (Anders Holm) weren’t looking to start a family when they find out they have a baby on the way. Similarly, Samantha’s star pupil Jasmine (Gail Bean) learns that she’s pregnant as well. While both women want to keep their children, they struggle to reconcile the idea of becoming mothers while maintaining their other identities and staying true to their other goals in life.

“There’s very few to no films told about pregnancy told from the female perspective. All of the kind of mega-popular ones – like Knocked Up or Nine Months, or She’s Having a Baby – are all told from the male perspective,” Swanberg explained to uInterview in an exclusive interview. “And it’s usually a man sort of saying, ‘Oh, my wife’s crazy what do I do?’ And it’s really rare to see a movie told from a woman’s perspective as she’s going through pregnancy.”

Smulders added, “I feel like whenever people learn that you’re pregnant there’s like a handful of things that are always asked like, ‘What are you craving?,’ ” adding, “There are these questions that have been formed from all of these movies, and we have them in [Unexpected] a little bit because they are real things, but I think Kris did an amazing job writing and directing this movie, where it was a more grounded, realistic version of pregnancy, and of the things that a woman has to go through – not just physically but emotionally as well.”

Check Out Cobie Smulders’ uBio HERE

Smulders was pregnant with her second child with her husband, Saturday Night Live cast member Taran Killam, while filming Unexpected, which she jokingly admitted, helped “portraying someone who was tired and didn’t know how to speak.” As for the baby belly itself, the How I Met Your Mother alum said it was both an advantage and a disadvantage during filming.

“I feel like the money we saved on a prosthetic belly for me went straight to our craft service, which our crew loved,” Smulders quipped. “But, this is an independent film, so you know in the morning I would be one week pregnant and by the afternoon I was six months, and at the end of the day, it was back to three months…. Sometimes the belly helped and sometimes it didn’t.”

Playing Smulders’ mother in the film is Downton Abbey star Elizabeth McGovern, who Smulders, an admitted fan of the actress, thinks did a commendable job playing a potentially unlikeable matriarch.

“She was sort of given, I think, quite a challenging character because this is a mom that can come across very unlikable,” Smulders told uInterview. “But she portrayed this woman with such sincerity and she was just so raw about it that you sort of understood her perspective.”

Unexpected hits theaters in limited release July 24 and will be available on VOD and iTunes the same day.