Hilaria Baldwin insists that the Spanish accent she’s been mocked over for years—despite being born to American parents with no Spanish ancestry and raised in Massachusetts—is totally “normal.”
Baldwin, born Hillary Thomas, has been married to actor Alec Baldwin since 2012, with whom she shares seven children. Baldwin explains some of her thinking behind the accent, which she referred to as “mixing” English and Spanish, in the upcoming premiere episode of the family’s TLC reality show The Baldwins, scheduled to air this Sunday, Feb. 23.
“I think just growing up speaking two languages is extremely special,” Baldwin says on the show. “I love English and I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic...When I mix the two, it makes me normal!” she continues.
In 2020, sleuths uncovered that the way that Baldwin had been discussing her childhood and background had been anything but “normal.”
The entrepreneur appeared on a Today Show cooking segment in 2015, during which she portrayed herself as speaking Spanish as a first language, to the point of forgetting the English word for cucumber. She had listed Majorca, Spain as her place of birth on her agency’s website at the time, according to the Daily Mail, which also reported Baldwin’s parents had lived in Boston’s Beacon Hill from when she was three through when she turned 28.
The mystery unraveled, as friends and neighbors from her Boston neighborhood came forward to describe her as never having had a Spanish accent when they knew her.
Baldwin’s parents did eventually move to Majorca, a fact she’s turned to for validation of her accent. While addressing the controversy to the New York Times in 2020, Baldwin justified saying she was from Spain because she calls “home” wherever her parents are. “If my parents move to China, I am going to go to China and say, ‘I’m going home,‘” she said at the time.
She intermittently dropped the Spanish accent in other videos and appearances. Social media threads emerged to troll Baldwin and track when she was and wasn’t using the accent. She eventually addressed the ongoing controversy again in an Instagram video, saying, “It’s not something that I’m, like, playing at. So I want that to be very, very, very clear,” in the now-deleted post, according to Business Insider.
Alec Baldwin, for his part, has consistently had his wife’s back on the topic, despite deepening the controversy himself by stating she was “from Spain,” during a 2013 interview with David Letterman. He wrote in her defense in 2020 that he “understood, from day one, that she born here and raised, for many years, in both the U.S. and Spain.”
Now, Hilaria Baldwin is finally opening up about what that public backlash felt like in the new reality show about her family. “I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places,” she admits. Still, she said of her children, who each have Spanish names, “I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language.”
After all, she reiterated, “My nuclear family now lives over in Spain.”
“My family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonged in multiple places,” all realize “that we are a mix of all these different things and that is going to have an impact on how we sound and how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms,” she also says in the episode.
“That’s normal,” she insists. “That’s what’s called being human.”
