Emma Roberts revealed she had to announce her pregnancy with boyfriend Garrett Hedlund a little earlier than she would have liked all because her mom, Kelly Cunningham, couldn’t stay off of Instagram long enough to keep it a secret.
During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday, the actress said, “I was keeping my pregnancy pretty low-key, but unfortunately my mother has Instagram. Mothers and Instagram, it’s a bad combination. She spilled the beans.” She explained, “You have to understand about my mom, she doesn’t own a computer and she had a flip phone until about three years ago. For Mother’s Day, I got her an iPhone, because I was like, ‘Now we can FaceTime and iMessage.’ It was such a lovefest, and it was the worst thing I ever did.”
Once she had a new iPhone, Cunningham got an Instagram account that started out with a few hundred followers and quickly “grew to she had no idea what she was dealing with.” So when Roberts’s fans started DM-ing her mom to congratulate her on becoming a grandmother, Cunningham enthusiastically thanked them. “It was a disaster, and I found it all out on a plane so I couldn’t get to her, I couldn’t call her or attack her,” Roberts said. “I could just iMessage with her and DM her and ask her to please stop.”
When the actress was finally able to get ahold of her mother, Cunningham told her that she had responded to fans because she thought Roberts had already confirmed her pregnancy, but it was actually just a tabloid story. Roberts added that they “kind of laughed” and “kind of got into a fight” over the incident, which led her to temporarily block her mom on social media.
“She texted me at 2 a.m., ‘Queen, did you block me, question mark, sad face,’” the actress explained. “And I was like, ‘Yes, I did block you.’ And then I unblocked her. It’s been an Instagram war with my mother that I never saw coming. It’s a good story to tell the baby.” And even better now that Cunningham no longer has an Instagram account on which to spill more of her daughter’s secrets.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Monica Lewinsky on the Pandemic’s Forgotten F-Word
— Why Harry and Meghan Won’t Spend Christmas With the Queen
— What One Book Critic Learned by Reading 150 Trump Books
— How Ghislaine Maxwell Recruited Young Girls for Jeffrey Epstein
— More Details Emerge on Prince Harry and Prince William’s “Bitter Explosion”
— Tracing Photographer Richard Avedon’s Bohemian Coming of Age
— From the Archive: The Mysteries of Princess Diana’s Fatal Car Crash
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.