Patricia Heaton advises couples wanting to have kids to start trying as early as possible.
The “Everybody Loves Raymond” star, who, alongside her husband, produced the movie “Unexpected,” which is about a couple’s infertility journey, told Fox News Digital that one of the roadblocks for couples dealing with the issue is that “people are waiting longer to try and get pregnant.”
“So they’re in their 30s before they’re trying. And I understand that we’re living in a different time now. You might feel like, in your 20s, you’re not ready, you can’t afford it. But, if at all possible, the earlier you start, the better,” Heaton said. “You have better chances because once you get in your 30s, and then you realize there’s an issue, the clock is really ticking.”
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In 2020, Heaton called motherhood “indescribable.”
“Being a mother is indescribable; joy, worry, delight, frustration, but ultimately the greatest satisfaction and deepest human love of your life. So grateful,” she wrote in an Instagram post in 2020 along with a throwback photo of her boys when they were young.
Heaton and her husband, David Hunt, met in the late 1980s and have been married since October 1990. They share four grown sons together who inspired the name of their production company, FourBoys Entertainment.
Their children are Samuel, 31, John, 29, Joseph, 27 and Daniel, 26.
WATCH: PATRICIA HEATON WARNS COUPLES NOT TO WAIT TOO LONG BEFORE TRYING TO HAVE CHILDREN
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Heaton and Hunt spoke with Fox News Digital about balancing their marriage and the challenges that sometimes come with working together.
“We’re both actors with strong opinions,” the actress told Fox News Digital. “Dave was the director, so there’s that.”
Heaton, a producer on “Unexpected,” said she would sit next to Hunt while he was directing and, although she has no interest in being a director herself, “I do have opinions.”
“So, we would sit at the monitors together, and I just made sure he had it before he leapt out of his chair to go talk to the actors,” she said.
Hunt added that it took the couple “a minute,” but they were eventually able to set up a “routine” for working together.
“I got so passionate about it,” he said of directing the movie, “my headphones would come up, and I’d fly on set and I would hear, ‘Wait wait, wait, I’ve got notes,’ and ‘Oh, hang on,’ so we would always say I wouldn’t rush onto set until we had conferred, if she had anything cogent to say.”
WATCH: PATRICIA HEATON, HUSBAND DAVID HUNT ON WORKING TOGETHER: ‘WE’RE BOTH ACTORS WITH STRONG OPINIONS’
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The movie, originally released in 2023 and now available on Amazon Prime Video, came from a book they optioned in 2004 called “Enslaved by Ducks,” about a couple who adopt several animals.
“It was very amusing, but it wasn’t working as a screenplay,” Hunt explained. “And we had a reading in our house in L.A. with some actors and it kind of died a death. And I turned to the writer who we’d been working with for a while and I said, ‘We need a new engine. Let’s make the couple childless, and they can’t have kids, and they think about adopting… animals as a substitute for the children, and blah, blah, let’s use that.'”
Hunt said the writer wrote a first draft in a week.
“He said, ‘Yeah, it poured out of me.’ He said, ‘I never told you this’ – And we’d been working with him for several years – ‘Both my daughters were adopted.’ And it was at that moment that we realized, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve really hit on a nerve here because this is an issue that’s not talked about enough,'” Hunt explained. “And we had had a lot of friends who had struggled with the same issue for many years, very painful experiences they went through. So that was kind of the genesis of it.”
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Heaton said of the movie’s rerelease: “We feel like it didn’t get a fair viewing the first time out, it’s like two years old. And so we really wanted to take this opportunity to share it with the audience, because there’s so many people we know that are struggling with this issue.”
Heaton explained that they were forced to shoot “Unexpected” a second time after having it nearly finished when the pandemic hit in 2020.
“We had to shoot this movie twice because the first one happened, the first shoot happened and the pandemic shut us down five days before we were finished,” she said. “We only had five days left, and we had to redo the whole thing. We had to… do all kinds of crazy stuff, so that was very tense and difficult, but you know we’re still here, we’re together.”
WATCH: PATRICIA HEATON’S HUSBAND DAVID HUNT DESCRIBES INSPIRATION BEHIND THEIR MOVIE ‘UNEXPECTED’
Hunt said he hoped the audience would take from the film that “anything is possible if your heart is in the right place.”
Heaton added, “I think in all the projects that I’ve been blessed to be in, ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ ’The Middle’ and now ‘Unexpected,’ it’s about seeing your life with humor, embracing the messiness, not looking at things as necessarily negative, but seeing things as opportunities to grow, seeing challenges as opportunities to discover some new things about yourself, your life, where you’re going, where your partner is. Embracing the challenges, embracing the difficulties and embracing it together.”
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While talking about their marriage in a 2008 interview with Today’s Christian Woman, the couple explained that they met after Hunt became her landlord when she sublet his apartment.
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“It was great, because I had an in,” Hunt joked. “I’d call her to discuss the phone bill or some such nonsense, but I ended up reading her Yeats over the phone. When she didn’t hang up, I figured there was a crack in the door.”
Heaton told the outlet that she was wary of Hunt at first because he was an actor and actors “never commit to anything for long,” but he “hooked me with that British accent, and then I was in too deep.”
She said at the time that the best part of being married is “having somebody who knows you at your worst and is still there for you.”
