Helen Hunt shared a rare photo of her only child, Makena Lei Carnahan, to celebrate the 22-year-old’s milestone day as she graduated from Northwestern University on Tuesday. The Mad About You star took to Instagram to congratulate Makena on her incredible achievement with a glowing photo of the mother-daughter duo.
“Look at this Wildcat and her wonderful friends!” she wrote in the caption. “Happy Graduation my Love. You. Are. Amazing.” She included a photo of the pair hugging, with Makena dressed in a white frock under her purple graduation gown while holding a bouquet of bright yellow flowers.
The second photo saw Makena and her friends up on the big screen at the ceremony as they cheered and celebrated their achievement.
Helen welcomed the graduate with her ex-partner, Matthew Carnahan, in 2004, three years after they began dating. The couple split in 2017, and she has been dating actor Jeffrey Nordling since 2022.
The actress is incredibly private about her family life, yet revealed on Live with Kelly and Ryan in 2021 that she was heartbroken when Makena chose to go to college thousands of miles away from her. “My daughter is gone. She has let me know. I looked at the list of colleges, I was like, ‘There’s nothing 2,500 miles close to my house,'” she explained.
Helen previously shared that she hoped Makena didn’t follow her footsteps into Hollywood, but that she would protect her as best she could if her daughter chose that path.
© Instagram“I think if my daughter was interested in acting, I would find ways for her to act in theater that has to do with her school or a kids’ improvisational thing,” Helen told Vulture. “There are ways to do it where you’re not on a movie set with 60 adults, which I loved at the time, but as a parent, I don’t know that I’d be dying to put her in that spot.”
Despite this, Makena has chosen to pursue her passion for music and is a guitarist and vocalist in the band Widemouth, which is based in Chicago.
© Getty ImagesThe group “play indie music of the folk/rock variety”, as per their website, and have performed “around the bars and houses and venues of Chicago for a little more than two years, interspersed by a few self-booked tours around the Midwest and East Coast.”
© Getty ImagesThe website details that Makena formed the group after putting up a flyer at her university. “Mak gets the lion’s share of credit for the band’s beginnings. She put up a flyer in a Northwestern building that said something like ‘Wanna be in a super awesome band?’ which Jamie responded to, even though there wasn’t much time left before he graduated and went to some other metropolitan area to be a yuppy,” the description read.
They added that the third member, Lily, joined the band six months later, and “Widemouth was born”.
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