Riki Lindhome was on her back and in stirrups, an ultrasound probe inserted into her uterus, when suddenly the doctor performing the procedure recognised her from The Big Bang Theory. “While this thing is inside of me, she goes, ‘Hey! You’re Ramona!’” recalls the actor, who did indeed star in the smash-hit sitcom, but would rather not have been remembered for it at that exact moment in time, given, well, the stirrups and the probe.
“I had to laugh,” says Lindhome, now 47, laughing again. “Because that was like, honestly, the eighth-worst thing that happened to me that day.” The awkward moment occurred during a medical procedure to end Lindhome’s pregnancy after a routine scan in her second trimester showed that the baby’s heart was growing in the wrong place.
Laughing through the pain is a special skill of hers, and one that came in handy when she found herself trying to have a baby – a process that would end up taking more than a decade, and involved pregnancy loss, several rounds of IVF, a failed adoption, seven surgeries, the first-date anxiety of finding the right surrogate, and about a gazillion at-home hormone injections. It’s not exactly what you’d call a hilarious experience, but Lindhome has spun it into one with her one-woman show Dead Inside, which arrives at the Soho Theatre this week following its hit run in the US and an Edinburgh Fringe premiere in 2024.
As well as starring in shows like The Big Bang Theory, Wednesday, and Gilmore Girls, Lindhome is known to many as one half of Garfunkel and Oates, the musical duo behind obscene, innuendo-laden songs that went viral on YouTube in the 2010s. Dead Inside is shot through with the same sexual frankness, as Lindhome takes her audience on a whistle-stop tour of her experience with brutally honest musical numbers such as “Pregnant Women Are Smug”, and “Bio Dad”, about finding a sperm donor.
For a show that runs the gamut of emotions, Lindhome’s DIY emoji cue cards – inviting her audience to laugh here, weep there – are comically reductive, a tonal mismatch that exemplifies the show’s off-kilter appeal.
Lindhome hates the phrase “fertility journey”, but hers started at 34 when she went for a reproductive health check-up. “It was already almost too late,” says Lindhome. “I had the egg count of a much older woman.” She froze her eggs three times. Later attempts to implant the embryos, first with a friend as a sperm donor and then using a sperm bank, failed.
In her late thirties, Lindhome met someone who had two young kids of his own, and they started trying naturally. She couldn’t believe it when she got pregnant. Months later, in her second trimester, there were the complications that landed her in the stirrups with the probe and the starstruck doctor. “But the procedure was botched,” she says, which led to more surgeries, more procedures.
Over the next year, Lindhome underwent a total of seven surgeries and two more rounds of IVF. She reels these off like items on a shopping list, with the sort of detachment that is perhaps necessary for someone who’s lived it. “We did absolutely everything we could to have a baby,” she says.
At 40 years old, she was advised to look for a donor egg, younger than her own. She selected a donor, only for the donor to change her mind. They found a new one, but days before they were about to implant, it was her partner who changed his mind about the baby – and about Lindhome. “The breakup happened so suddenly,” says Lindhome, as if she still can’t quite believe it. “Losing his kids was the hardest thing. I never saw them again. We didn’t get to say goodbye.”
They broke up in February 2020, just as the pandemic hit. The split came as a shock and a blow, but Lindhome persevered with her quest to have a baby. She tried implanting her own embryos, which didn’t take “because I didn’t know it at the time, but I had endometriosis”. Next up, she explored adoption. “There’s so much luck involved,” she says. “People think there’s just a million babies waiting to be adopted, but it’s complex and hard.”
Her friends without fertility problems didn’t know the right thing to say. “They would immediately jump to advice, which made me feel like it was my fault,” says Lindhome. “People who are fertile don’t understand that it’s not always a case of mentality. Sometimes there are things wrong with your body. You can’t positively think your way out of endometriosis, a tilted uterus, low egg count, and perimenopause.”
Eventually, Lindhome turned to surrogacy with a donor embryo. “I was convinced it was going to go wrong,” she says, having been scarred from everything that preceded it. “But the implantation worked, and then it just kept working. I didn’t let myself think about it, really, until she was six months pregnant – and even then, I was so superstitious that I didn’t want to take the crib that I had bought for adoption out of storage.” At the last minute, she cancelled her baby shower, fearing that it was a bad omen. “And anyway, who wants to go to a Zoom baby shower?” laughs Lindhome, who was in Romania at the time filming Wednesday. On 1 March 2022, her son, Keaton, was born via surrogate.
Today, Lindhome is still beaming: that new-mum glow still going strong more than four years later. (A week or so before we meet, she celebrated Keaton’s fourth birthday with a party at Chuck E Cheese.) She hopes Dead Inside will be a love letter to her son when he’s old enough to watch it. “If ever he’s being a jerk, I can show him this and be like, look what I went through!” she laughs. “Look how much I wanted you!”
Lindhome had been prepared and happy to raise Keaton as a single mum when she unexpectedly reconnected with an old friend, Fred Armisen, on the set of Wednesday when her baby was in utero. They married in June that year, months after Keaton’s birth.
It is, by all accounts, a happy ending. Still, rehashing those years on stage night after night, for months on end, can’t be easy. “When I started at Edinburgh, my director would have to give me a hug after every performance,” she says. “And if I couldn’t get through it, we had a backup recording of the show that we could play.” It has gotten easier with time, says Lindhome: “I can actually perform it instead of reliving it, now.”
Keaton has started asking for a sibling, but that looks unlikely. “No,” says Lindhome. “It was so hard already – and when would it happen? When I’m 56 and working? Sure, if I got pregnant naturally tomorrow, I’d be stoked; or if someone dropped a baby off on my doorstep…” But Lindhome knows the odds, having beaten them herself not so long ago.
If there is one thing that Lindhome wants people to take from her show, besides a belly of laughs, it is to go get their fertility checked. “Seriously… if you can, please do it,” she says.
But even in the hardest moments of trying to conceive, she says there was never any thought of giving up. “Something one of my friends said really stuck with me: ‘Everyone I know who wants a baby, gets one eventually,’” she says. “Maybe it’s not the way they think it’s going to happen, or in their timeline – but as long as I didn’t take it off the table in my mind, it was going to happen.”
The Sands national helpline provides support for anyone affected by the death of a baby. You can call 0808 164 3332 free of charge, or email [email protected]
‘Dead Inside’ is at Soho Theatre, London until 18 April; tickets here
