Skip to main content

‘The Baby’: Michelle de Swarte Talks Murderous Babies

The Baby trailer screencap of a woman holding a baby.

The Baby is a new show on HBO that tells us one important fact about life: babies kill. No really, this baby just straight up murders people. Natasha (Michelle de Swarte) needs a break from her life and her friends, who are all having kids, to figure herself out. So, renting a cabin on the beach, she takes a getaway for herself.

Recommended Videos

The problem is that this cabin is strangely just alone on this beach, and the woman renting it to Natasha clearly has … something going on. But Tasha is just trying to work on herself, so she stays the night—and suddenly a woman falls to her death next to the cabin, and a baby falls directly into her arms.

What ensues is a world of mystery surrounding the powers of this baby and his seeming ability to take over someone’s life and make everything about himself, to the point where even Tasha’s best friends think that he’s her child, even though they knew her before she went to the cabin. So, you know, it’s a metaphor for having kids and the complex issues that exist in our society over a woman deciding she doesn’t want to have any.

In preparation for the release of the series, I got to talk with star Michelle de Swarte over Zoom about the series and about Tasha as a character!

Babies kill

The series is about a woman coming to terms with the fact that her friends are having families and moving on, and while she’s content in her own decisions, she is losing them, in some respect. It’s a wide range of women reacting to the idea of motherhood, and for de Swarte, it’s one of the things she liked about the show.

“You know, you get different perspectives of women,” de Swarte said. “The people that are having kids where their friends aren’t that accommodating and how she feels kind of betrayed and abandoned. And then you’ve got the person who wants a kid and just found out she’s pregnant. So I really liked that really found an interesting humorous way of speaking from all of these different perspectives.”

But Tasha doesn’t really get charmed by a baby. She actively has a disinterest in the cutesy baby reactions that typically have female characters cooing over them.

“What I loved about Natasha is that at no point is she charmed by this baby? And I just think normally we’re, you know, when we see these kind of interactions and it’s a woman with a baby or anyone with a baby, they instantly just start speaking in a soft voice and they’re somehow endear to this child and that doesn’t happen with Natasha,” de Swarte pointed out. “Natasha really sees this baby on sort of like equal terms and anything the baby does to try to win Natasha over, Natasha reads it as quite sinister, which I thought was hilarious. And that’s such an interesting take on the dynamic of a woman and a baby.”

But that wasn’t always easy for de Swarte. Tasha’s indifference to the baby meant that she had to react indifferently even if she really thought what the baby was doing was cute. “I guess we’ve done so many things leading up to actually me playing Natasha that by the time we got to that first day on set, we’d done like a extensive chats about Natasha’s origin story, why she behaves the way that she does, you know, her feelings about motherhood, her feelings about the baby that I felt pretty rooted in what the intentions were,” she admitted. “And so I guess the hard is thing in that first meeting when Natasha first gets the baby and me as an actor was not speaking like this because the babies are so cute.” (Obviously, de Swarte did the cooing voice.)

So, it wasn’t just an easy fit for de Swarte. She had the challenge of channeling that disinterest that Tasha has towards the baby. “You just kind of wanna be like, oh, but having to be focused on the acting side of things and even when the baby was doing something cute, just being like, yeah, whatever was challenging.”

The series isn’t just about women who don’t want kids. It has a range of characters that represent where a lot of women are in their lives—those who want kids but don’t have them yet, mothers, and the women who don’t want kids at all. And de Swarte hopes the series can help them all feel represented: “I hope that the moms feel seen. And I hope that the people that don’t have children, but you know, have also had to deal with sometimes like the disappointment or like the abandonment, those feelings of your friends going off to have kids and kind of like what that means for you, I hope they feel seen as well. But really more than anything, like I just hope people enjoy it. I hope people enjoy it and I hope it makes some love. And I also hope that it scares them as well because it is a horror. So, you know, I hope we do the genre proud.”

Michelle de Swarte is absolutely incredible in The Baby and it is a much watch on HBO! It airs Sunday, April 24th on HBO.

(image: HBO)

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

Author
Rachel Leishman
Rachel Leishman (She/Her) is an Assistant Editor at the Mary Sue. She's been a writer professionally since 2016 but was always obsessed with movies and television and writing about them growing up. A lover of Spider-Man and Wanda Maximoff's biggest defender, she has interests in all things nerdy and a cat named Benjamin Wyatt the cat. If you want to talk classic rock music or all things Harrison Ford, she's your girl but her interests span far and wide. Yes, she knows she looks like Florence Pugh.

Filed Under:

Follow The Mary Sue: