Malin Akerman has revealed how weekly “Sebby Sundays” became her lifeline while navigating divorce and new motherhood simultaneously.
Akerman, 48, told Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast that the period after her 2013 split from drummer Roberto Zincone was overwhelming. The separation came just as the couple welcomed their son Sebastian, now 13, and she was returning to work on a comedy series where she also served as producer.
“It was a lot,” she said when Cooper, herself a new mother, asked how she processed both endings and beginnings at once. “Was it hard? Yeah. To be going through a divorce, I just started back at work, I was now bringing my son with me to work.”
The Swedish-Canadian actress found practical solutions where she could. Her office became a nursery, allowing Sebastian to stay with her daily. Yet the emotional load proved crushing. She described the difficulty of “mourning the end of a relationship, doing a comedy, stepping into motherhood, being up all night feeding [her son] and then going to work” all concurrent.
Two months after the separation, her best friend moved in. Akerman recalled they “had the best time” together during that transitional phase.
The ritual that sustained her emerged organically. Akerman had acquired a neon sign reading “Sebby Sunday” — a nickname for Sebastian — and transformed it into a weekly gathering that ran for two full years.
“Every Sunday, I have a neon sign and it says Sebby Sunday – my son’s name is Sebastian – and it became Sebby Sundays because every Sunday I’d invite all the parents, all my friends and and non-parents to come over, hang by the pool, pop the rosé, kids are roaming around, this is great,” she explained.
The gatherings evolved as evening fell. “Put the kids to bed, the music comes out, the disco ball goes on, and we’d dance all night.”
Akerman characterized the practice as deliberately joyful rather than escapist. “It was like celebrating the good things in life, you know, and seeing the community that I had versus seeing the losses,” she said. She and her friends would “dance our troubles away,” a practice she found “cathartic.”
The Sunday tradition eventually gave way to deeper processing. Akerman described entering “a year of reckoning” where she began transcendental meditation and therapy to address the accumulated strain.
The actress married British actor Jack Donnelly in 2018, five years after her separation from Zincone. The couple wed in Mexico in a ceremony that marked a new chapter following her period of intentional healing.
Akerman’s filmography includes roles in 27 Dresses, The Proposal, Watchmen, and the recent series The Hunting Wives. She has spoken previously about the challenges of balancing career demands with single parenthood in the immediate post-divorce period.