Seth Meyers, Ryan Reynolds & More Celeb Dads Share Sweet (and Hilarious) Stories from the Delivery Room

In an unexpected turn of events, Seth and wife Alexi Ashe welcomed their second son in the lobby of their apartment building on April 8. The comedian recounted the unbelievable story a day later during an episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers. 

Once his wife realized she wasn’t going to make it to the hospital, they spent a moment debating: lobby or elevator? Before Seth could make a choice, Alexi got down on the floor of the lobby. “I called 911 and over the course of a minute conversation, I said, ‘We’re about to have a baby — we’re having a baby — we had a baby,'” Meyers said.

He got emotional when speaking about how strong his wife had been, but quickly played off the tears by joking, “I’m getting choked up thinking about how brave I was.”

After taking Carson Daly’s advice to eat before joining wife Behati Prinsloo into the delivery room, The Voice judge did just that, resorting to binging on various foods, including cheeseburgers, before the birth of 1-year-old daughter Dusty Rose.

“So [Behati] kind of went into labor throughout the day, and it was beautiful. I was eating a lot though,” he said, recounting the hilarious September 2016 story to host Jimmy Kimmel. “We finally go to the hospital, I’ve put back an unbelievable amount of food. Like basically bursting at the seams, I was gonna s— my pants.”

“Also, my wife is in labor and it’s the lamest thing to be when your wife is going to be having a baby and you’re like ‘I got to take a s—.’ That’s not, in any way, a viable complaint. So you got to keep it inside, literally and figuratively. It was brutal,” Levine remembered.

“I waited, doubled over in pain. Finally, the baby came it was beautiful and amazing. And the second coast was clear, I took one of the nurses aside and I was like, ‘Look you got to find me a bathroom.’ And there was one a foot from the bed.”

The Bridesmaids actor divulged hilarious details about his wife’s home birth. O’Dowd, who welcomed son Valentine with wife Dawn O’Porter in July 2017, dispelled rumors that he had delivered the newborn. 

“That’s probably overstating it … I caught him,” he said during his appearance on Live with Kelly and Ryan. “We didn’t know if it was going to be a boy or a girl. It’s a lot. It’s a lot of new information when a baby comes out.”

He added: “I caught him and my wife was like, ‘What is it?’ And I said, ‘It’s a baby!’”

The actor decided to get a little humorous when wife Blake Lively was in labor with daughter James, now 3. “I jammed a little Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On,'” he shared on Late Night with Seth Meyers. “It was like steak knives coming out of her eyes. Just like, ‘Are you f—ing s—-ing me right now?'” But according to Reynolds, Lively was just as playful as him for the majority of the birth. “She was a mercenary … I think I just caught her right in the middle of a contraction,” he said. “She was pretty much making jokes the entire time.”

During a Chelsea Lately appearance, Tatum talked about getting emotional while awaiting the birth of daughter Everly, 4, with wife Jenna Dewan Tatum. “I probably went to the bathroom like four times and had, like, a crying fit, like, ‘I don’t know what to do,” he said. 

The dad gave even more details about the delivery room in a later Vanity Fair interview. “It was crazy. You feel helpless,” he said. “We like to think of ourselves as big, strong men, and we could handle whatever situation. And reality is [that women] are so much stronger than we could ever be. There’s a reason why we weren’t given that job, evolutionary or whatever. My wife, she’s a warrior. She did it as natural as you can. [As a man], you’re basically a cheerleader. ‘Come on, baby, you can do it.’ I would’ve tapped out in the first.”

Cannon dished on ex-wife Mariah Carey‘s unconventional delivery room request on The Gayle King Show. “Now my wife wanted to make sure that when the babies came out, that they came out not only to a Mariah Carey song, but a live performance from Mariah Carey — her Madison Square performance of ‘Fantasy’ — so they came out to a round of applause,” he said of twins Monroe and Moroccan, now 6.

The Guardians of the Galaxy star recounted his now 5-year-old son Jack’s emotional premature birth during a speech at a March of Dimes celebration. “Anna [Faris] woke me up in the middle of the night and she told me that her water had just broken. It was two-and-a-half months early. Oh, baby. Ready or not,” he shared. “He was 3 lbs., 12 ounces. Anna got to hold him for a moment and then it was off to the NICU — the neonatal intensive care unit. 3 lbs., 12 ounces. That’s a decent size bass. Very small for a human …

“The only people allowed to touch him were his mom and me, unless you were wearing gloves. We did this amazing thing they call ‘skin-to-skin’ — it was just the best feeling I ever had. It’s just what it sounds like. My little boy was laying across my neck and chest feeling my heartbeat and feeling my love, and I played him country music and I sang to him and I made him promises … in that moment … you know, about … just about what kind of dad I wanted to be, and I just prayed that he’d be here long enough and he was going to let me keep him.”

The actor got candid about the 2008 birth of his first child, Levi, now 9. “Contractions started kicking in. We had a 14-hour session, [wife Camila Alves] and I did. I sat there with her, right between her legs. We got tribal on it, we danced to it! I was DJ-ing this Brazilian music. We were jamming!” he said in an interview. “[Camila] was sweating. No painkiller, let’s go. She just clicked into that gear that only a woman has at a time like this …This is where I learned — and no one tells you this — but having a baby is a bloody, pukey, sweaty, primeval thing! And I mean that as a beautiful thing. It is wild. But the vacuum didn’t work, and the doctor said, ‘C-section.’ “

Shepard told Ellen DeGeneres about the last-minute C-section wife Kristen Bell had with their second daughter, Delta, 3. “Kristen, God bless her, was in labor for 33 hours,” he shared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “[Her labor with first daughter Lincoln was] 15 [hours]. That’s child’s play… She got an epidural hour 14 — as you should — and I think dads need something. I deserve something because I was along for the ride. It’s still a car crash and I’m in the passenger seat. I’m playing Katy Perry and I’m breathing and I’m rubbing her back and I have fatigue and I think, ‘I need something for this, help me.'”

Things got even more intense when it came time for the C-section. “So there’s a sheet and then they go, ‘The baby’s here!’ Then you peek around the sheet and they’re lifting out the baby, but then you notice your wife is completely disassembled,” Shepard said. “I can see inside of her … I was like, ‘It’s a girl! Your liver’s out, I think. And those are definitely your intestines. And she has your eyes! Oh my God, put her back together correctly.'”

Sudeikis told David Letterman all about the crazy circumstances leading up to the birth of his and Olivia Wilde‘s son, Otis, 3. “Around 9 p.m. nothing is moving. … She’s like, ‘Okay, it’s going to be a couple hours, the doctor says. Honey, I’m not allowed to have any food in case something were to go haywire, go ahead and go get some food.’ … I’m like, ‘Well I’m going to Taco Bell’ ’cause I’m about to be a dad,” he recounted on The Late Show. 

“I then leave Taco Bell and I think, ‘Well what would a dad from the ’50s do? He’d go to a bar.’ I’m going to go to a bar,” he continued. “I’m thinking, well, I got to take a picture of this, so I lift up my phone, I see ‘Missed call: Olivia.’ It started to ring again … so I answer the phone and I’m like, ‘Hon, what’s going on?’ And she goes, ‘It’s happening, get back here, it’s happening.’ … Then I’m out the door and I’m running like the scene in a Tom Cruise movie, just hauling butt … Within 20 minutes, three pushes, there’s little Otis. We pop on the Pandora as the family, the three of us, are sitting there. The first song that comes on: Cat Stevens, ‘Father and Son.’ Like right out of a movie. It was incredible.”

“I was holding her hands and cheering her on,” Diggs said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show of supporting then-wife Idina Menzel while she was in labor in 2009. “I said I would look two times. I would look when the baby was crowning, and I wanted to look right when [son] Walker came out.” He continued: “And then when he came out, all the sudden it was like my inner gangster came out. I was like, ‘Yeah baby, that’s what I’m talkin’ about, that’s my boy. It was crazy. I couldn’t control myself. It was like the Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup, everything wrapped up into one.”