RIGBY: The Erwins asked me if I would be interested in sharing my testimony and they were so great about it, telling me to pray about it and assuring me that they didn’t want to push me into anything. Instead you told the Erwins about your own experience with abortion and decided to talk about it while promoting October Baby. QUESTION: You could have taken the part, turned in a wonderful performance, and never mentioned the personal pain that allowed you to bring so much authenticity to the role. Certainly the Erwins had no idea that this was part of my past. So it was really intense to read something so close to my life that not that many people knew about.

Then when the character goes and speaks with her husband and shares with him what she’d done - that same exact thing happened in my life when my husband and I were probably in the sixth or seventh year of our marriage. was in the profession I worked in - I was a paralegal. Then halfway through the script I realized it paralleled my life 20 years ago. And my husband said to me, ‘Wow she really looks like you - she could be your daughter,’ which made it even more intriguing. RIGBY: When Jon called me and said please read the script, the first thing I saw on the front cover was Rachel Hendrix.

QUESTION: What was your reaction when you first read the script and realized how much of it resonated with your own life? Rigby, who turns in an emotionally wrenching performance as the young woman’s biological mother, recently spoke about the experiences she brought to the part and what she hopes audiences will take away from October Baby, which is entering its second weekend in theaters. (BP) - When producer/directors Jon and Andrew Erwin asked Shari Rigby to consider a small but crucial role in their film “October Baby,” none of them realized how closely the script about a young woman who discovers she survived an abortion attempt paralleled Rigby’s own life.

October baby movie