Hilaria Baldwin is owning the accent she has.
Alec Baldwin’s wife set the record straight—again—on the ongoing controversy surrounding her accent and cultural identity.
The Baldwins star took a moment in her new TLC reality series to address the backlash she’s faced over her bilingual background, making it clear that speaking two languages doesn’t make her any less authentic.
“I love English, I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two it doesn’t make me inauthentic, and when I mix the two, that makes me normal,” Baldwin said in a confessional scene.
Reflecting on the criticism, she admitted that the scrutiny has taken an emotional toll. “I’d be lying if I said [the controversy] didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places,” she shared.
However, Baldwin, 41, says the support of her family and multilingual community has helped her navigate the backlash.
“It was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonged in multiple places and realize that we are a mix of all these different things,” she explained.
“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.”
For Baldwin, being bilingual isn’t something to be questioned—it’s just part of being human. “It’s normal,” she said simply. “It’s called being human.”
As a mother of seven, Baldwin is also passing that appreciation for language on to her children, whom she shares with husband Alec Baldwin. Carmen, 11, Rafael, 9, Leonardo, 8, Romeo, 6, Eduardo, 4, María, 3, and Ilaria, 2, are all being raised bilingual.
“My family—all my nuclear family—now lives over in Spain,” she noted. “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.”
Baldwin’s identity has been the subject of public scrutiny since December 2020, when questions arose about her background.
While she had long suggested she was from Spain, reports surfaced that she was actually born in Boston as Hillary Hayward-Thomas.
In response, Baldwin explained in a lengthy Instagram video that while she was born in the U.S., she spent part of her childhood in Spain and was raised speaking both English and Spanish.
Now, she’s making it clear that no matter what people say, her bilingualism—and how she expresses it—is here to stay.