Zach Gilford is looking back at Midnight Mass and everything he went through — and missed — while filming.
The Netflix series was released in September 2021, but filmed in the height of the pandemic. Gilford, 43, said he was “really proud” of the project, despite all the necessary sacrifices..
“There’s a lot of existential stuff going on in that,” he said on the Tuesday, June 3, episode of The Julia Cunningham Show. “It was during the pandemic we shot it. I had to miss the birth of my son to shoot it, so I was in the head space of, ‘I suck. I don’t want to be here.’”
“This is like, ‘Maybe I’ll meet my son someday,’” he joked. “I did, spoiler.”
Though filming took him away from home, Gilford spoke glowingly about his time shooting Midnight Mass in a 2023 story with Us Weekly.
“I really learned something on that show that I’ve taken to other things because I had to do so much preparation to know it so well,” he told Us exclusively at the time. “That even on other things, I didn’t get to go back to L.A.’s Finest, but things that are much lighter and a little more fun. I was like, I’m gonna just know my stuff inside and out so that I can totally just be in the scene and never think about the words that are coming outta my mouth, but just feel them coming out and react to the person.”
In addition to t now-4-year-old Revel, Gilford also shares daughter Zeppelin, 7, with wife Kiele Sanchez. Gilford filed for divorce in April 2025 after 12 years of marriage, citing irreconcilable differences. He is seeking joint legal and physical custody of the two kids.
Prior to their separation Gilford and Sanchez, 47, recently appeared together on-screen, playing a couple on Criminal Minds: Evolution.
“It’s actually harder,” Gilford exclusively told Us in August 2024 of starring opposite his then-wife. “It’s harder because I don’t want to hold a gun to my wife’s head. … It just happened to be that the nature of these scenes were pretty gross.”
He added, “Honestly, all those scenes are so f***ed up. I’ll only speak for myself. Kiele can obviously speak for herself, but it felt gross [bringing those darker moments to life together].”
That wasn’t the first time the two shared the screen. Gilford and Sanchez met in 2010 on the set of a TV pilot called The Matadors in 2010. They later appeared together on Kingdom and The Purge: Anarchy.
