Josh Duhamel is detailing the complexities he and wife Audra Mari faced while expanding their family.
More than two months after the couple shared they welcomed their baby girl Rocca, the 53-year-old detailed the precarious diagnosis Mari received during her pregnancy, which put her at risk of hemorrhage when their daughter arrived.
“It was really hard on Audra, to be honest,” Duhamel said on the July 23, episode of Live With Kelly and Mark. “She had this thing called placenta previa, which means the placenta was sitting between the baby and the cervix. That’s how women used to bleed out back in the day.”
Luckily, the 32-year-old was able to deliver the baby safely, having scheduled a C-section to help avoid complications from the placenta previa.
"Thankfully we have modern medicine and everything,” Duhamel noted, “so we knew it was there.”
But the plan didn’t go exactly as scheduled, with the former Miss World America informing the Transformers star days before their appointment that she had an unsettling dream involving him tapping her on the nose. As a result, she opted to head to the hospital early.
“I won’t get into the gory details, but she said, ‘We got to go,’” Duhamel—who also shares Shepherd, 2, with Mari and Axl, 12, with ex-wife Fergie—recalled. “So, we rushed into the car, raced through about five red lights, and then had the baby two hours later.”
The Safe Haven actor expressed gratitude for the staff at the Sanford Medical Center in Fargo, North Dakota, for making their family feel “confident” and for helping them welcome a “beautiful baby girl” into the world.
As for how Shepherd is adjusting to being a big brother? Duhamel revealed it’s been a bit of an adjustment.
“He likes her kind of,” the Ransom Canyon actor explained, “but he also accidentally kicks her in the head.”
While Duhamel has a busy work schedule, one of his favorite roles will always be as a dad, although it’s not always easy balancing his responsibilities.
“I work a lot, and I often have a lot of guilt about not being there as often as I could be,” he told Us Weekly in September 2025. “So I try to maybe overcompensate or do things to be there often.”
Keep reading to see how other celebs have managed health scares…