Up until four years ago, Hilaria Baldwin was known simply as Alec Baldwin’s younger yoga instructing wife. The actor began dating Hilaria in August 2011 and the couple tied the knot in June 2012 in a lavish New York City ceremony, and usually, that would be that.
Everything changed in December 2020 when X—then known as Twitter—user @lenibriscoe@lenibriscoe pointed out that Hilaria, who had been speaking with a Spanish accent for quite some time at that point, was in fact born in Boston, Massachusetts. The viral tweet also included a clip of Hilaria the Today show struggling to remember the English word for cucumber, a video that went on to go very viral.
Now, Hilaria— who was born Hillary Hayward-Thomas— is back in the public sphere thanks to her new reality TV series, The Baldwins. As the title suggests, the show follows the Baldwin family— made up of Hilaria and her husband Alec Baldwin, as well as their seven children Carmen, 11, Rafael, 9, Leonardo, 8, Romeo, 6, Eduardo, 4, Maria, 3, and Ilaria, 2. Alec also has a 29-year-old daughter Ireland from his marriage to Kim Basinger.
In the show, Hilaria revealed that she won’t be ignoring her Spanish ‘roots’ and is raising her children to speak both Spanish and English.
She said, ‘I'm raising my kids to be bilingual. I was raised bilingual. My family, all my nuclear family now lives over in Spain. I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language. I think just growing up and speaking two languages, is extremely special.’
The show features plenty of footage of Hilaria speaking Spanish to her children, and while it’s clear Hilaria still identifies as Spanish, her husband also seems to share that belief. In a scene where Alec and Hilaria are having a heated conversation, Alec said, ‘Let's talk slower. Let's talk slower. You're speaking English in a Spanish cadence, which is always perilous for me. Slow down… I can't understand you.’
Hilaria also touched on the controversy from 2020, saying, ‘I'd 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.'
‘But it was my family, my friends, my community, who speak multiple languages, who have belonging in multiple places and realise that we are a mix of all these different things, and that's going to have an impact on how we sound and an impact on how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms. That's normal. That's called being human.’