Zachary Levi is going to be a dad for the first time!
The Shazam! actor revealed on Instagram Friday that he is expecting his first baby with girlfriend Maggie Keating. In the post, Levi also shared a photo of an ultrasound of their baby, in addition to a picture of Keating hugging the actor on the beach.
“I’ve wanted to be a dad since I was literally a kid,” he wrote in the caption. “I’ve always felt that call on my life. This desire in my heart. A strange feeling of incompleteness by not having that level of love and responsibility in my journey. That the best years of my life would be on the other side of finally being a father. But deep down I knew that there were things in my life that needed to shift before I was ready for the blessing of something so special and the responsibilities that come with it.”
Levi continued, “So last November I started to make some shifts in my life. Shifts that ultimately came down to loving and valuing myself more. Prioritizing my own health physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. And lo and behold, immediately things started to manifest for the better.”
The Chuck star went on to praise his girlfriend, writing, “And very quickly God brought a brilliant, honest, grounded, and deep love into my life thru the angelic form of @maggiekeating. A wonderful woman on the same journey of self discovery and love, ready to step into a new and amazing chapter of life with me. So, we did.”
“We can’t wait for y’all to meet our little bambino,” Levi concluded the post, noting that don’t know the baby’s sex just yet.
“I’ll be stoked out of my mind either way,” he added. “Always accepting potential baby names. Keep ‘em original, but not TOO original. We don’t need them being bullied more than their theater-nerd father.”
Levi’s announcement comes shortly after his former She Loves Me Broadway co-star Laura Benanti made it clear in a recent interview on the That’s a Gay Ass Podcast that she has never been a huge fan of the actor.
Benanti criticized the Spy Kids: Armageddon star for his remarks following Gavin Creel’s death. The Tony-winning actor died in September at 48 years old, after a brief battle with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma. However, Levi later suggested in an Instagram Live that Creel’s death was due to the COVID-19 vaccine.
“To use his memory for his political agenda and to watch him try to make himself cry until he had one single tear, which he did not wipe away,” Benanti said in response, “I was like, ‘Fuck you forever.'”