Alexandra Daddario on Filming Mayfair Witches While Pregnant with Her First Baby: ‘You Worry About Everything’ (Exclusive)

Actress Alexandra Daddario, who is starring on season 2 of the hit AMC show Mayfair Witches, is no nepo baby.

“My parents were both lawyers,” the 38-year-old tells PEOPLE of somewhat falling into an acting career. “I was raised in New York under the assumption that you went to college, then became a lawyer or a doctor or worked at a hedge fund. I don’t know how this happened, exactly.”

It happened pretty much by accident.

“I grew up in New York City and was quite a creative kid, into the arts,” she says. “But I was also a cute little kid. And someone saw me, a manager, in the audience of a children’s theater show.” She says she was lucky her mom was into the idea of trying her out in the business.

“For a lawyer, she’s also quite an unserious person in that she’s very imaginative and adventurous, and she thought, ‘Oh yeah, this is cool!'” Daddario says of her mom Christina. (Her father Richard, a prosecutor, was also at one time the head of the NYPD counterterrorism unit.)

“She knew nothing about acting,” she continues of her mom. “It’s not like in Hollywood where they’re worried and very guarded about their kids going into that sort of thing. I think, in her naivete, she she was just like, ‘Oh this will be such a fun extracurricular activity.’ So I started going on auditions and booking jobs, and then I landed a soap.”

At 16, Daddario starred as teen Laurie Lewis on All My Children. When she was in her mid-20s, she garnered attention for her role in the Imagine Dragons video for “Radioactive,” and then again for her first major film, Baywatch in 2017.

But she says it was her role in the first season of The White Lotus in 2021 that truly altered her career trajectory.

“That definitely changed things,” she says of playing the newlywed Rachel, who married rich and was grappling with her identity.

Since 2023, she’s been starring as Rowan Fielding in the thriller drama series Mayfair Witches, which just wrapped its second season on AMC.

“I didn’t know much about Anne Rice when I got the part, and as I dove into the books, I became more fascinated with her than the books themselves,” she says. “When you look at why she wrote these types of novels, and where this material comes from and her life experiences and what she was working through, you understand the subject matter better.”

She loves being a part of the show. “The love for these books and the love for the stories…it’s an army of very serious fans so I’m just lucky to be a part of it.”

The series follows her character, a neurosurgeon, who is also part of a family of powerful witches haunted by an evil entity named Lasher. Daddario filmed the second season in the heat and humidity of New Orleans as she was pregnant with her first child, a boy born in Oct. of 2024.

“You worry about everything,” she admits of her pregnancy. “There were some horror scenes where I was like, ‘I don’t know if I should let myself get worked up emotionally because the baby will feel it in my belly!'” she says.

As she embraces her new mom life, she says she does it in relative privacy.

“Oh I’m so anonymous,” says Daddario, who splits her time between the west and east coast with her husband, producer Andrew Form. She adds that it’s strange when she’s recognized in public or has her picture taken by a pap.

“Sometimes something will take me by surprise that feels like an invasion of privacy,” she says with a laugh. “But only because I’m not prepared for it!”

Mayfair Witches season 2 airs on AMC.