Southside With You star Tika Sumpter covers the latest issue of Fit Pregnancy and in it, she shares why she kept her pregnancy a secret for 7 months.
Even her closest friends were kept out of the dark the first-time mom-to-be disclosed during a recent press junket to promote her film.
“She’s my first child, and I wanted to experience every moment of this pregnancy for myself and enjoy it without everybody else being in it with me,” she said of her soon-to-be daughter. “Until recently, you couldn’t tell if I was pregnant or had a little beer belly!”
“I didn’t want to hear, ‘Who’s the dad?'” said Sumpter, who hasn’t revealed the name of her boyfriend and father of her child. “Social media can be harsh, and I’m a mama bear, protective of my family. So that’s why I waited to tell people, including some of my friends. My friends weren’t mad at me. They said, ‘You did it the way you wanted to do it. You’re an inspiration.’
She shared that het Haves and Have Nots director Tyler Perry guessed it tho.
“When I was five months, Tyler Perry texted me, ‘Are you pregnant?'” Sumpter dished. “Inside, I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, how did he know?’ I wrote back, ‘What are you talking about? You’re crazy!’ But when I saw him that afternoon, I told him.”
“He just said, ‘I knew it! Tika, this is going to be the best time of your life,'” she added. “I feel lucky that he’s been so supportive.”
She also talks about how she discovered she was pregnant though she and her boyfriend if two years weren’t planning on becoming parents at the time.
ET sat down with the actress last month, where she gushed about her future daughter, and what she hopes she’ll learn from Southside With You.
See more in the video below.
photos: Nina Munoz