Flippin’ In It with Cobie Smulders
We talk to the star of new film Unexpected about the challenges American women face when they're expecting.
It’s easy to believe that Cobie Smulders is How I Met Your Mother’s Robin Scherbatsky, the strong, independent career women who embodies both the “cool girl” factor and femininity. And not just because she played the character for nine seasons—on the big screen, Smulders extended her commanding resume in characters like Maria Hill (Avengers: Age of Ultron), Kat (Results) and now Samantha Abbott in Unexpected.
Unexpected, directed by Kris Swanberg, is a film that doesn’t dress itself up with pretense, but instead is a rare untold story about a woman who doesn’t have it all, and is struggling to find what that even means amidst societal expectations. Samantha Abbott is a passionate teacher whose security comes crashing to a startling halt when she becomes pregnant at 30. Instead of eliciting immediate elation, her pregnancy makes her question her current path in life. If that’s not enough, Samantha can’t escape her dilemma in the classroom, as she discovers that her student Jasmine (Gail Bean) is also pregnant. The two women forge an otherwise unlikely bond based on a mutual understanding of life’s—ahem—unexpected obstacles.
Recently, Paste had the chance to sit down with Cobie Smulders for a candid conversation about the many challenges expecting women can face.
Paste: You’ve done such rich material over the past few years. The characters you play are all so strong for various reasons. Is that what you gravitate towards?
Cobie Smulders: For this project I think it was more the storyline, and seeing these two women undergoing the same thing, but under very different circumstances. What I love the most about this film is that my character is very together—she knows what she wants to do with her life, and she’s in this stable relationship—and then she has a student in high school whose boyfriend is a little all over the place, and they both get pregnant, and the older woman is having the harder time. I thought there was something so interesting about that and seeing this sort of friendship form between these two women.