Hilaria Baldwin Says Forgetting the English Word for Cucumber Is Normal
“That’s called being human.”
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Take a step back, Karla Sofía Gascón. An OG Spanish problemista is speaking. In the first episode of their new TLC reality series, The Baldwins, Alec Baldwin’s wife Hilaria addresses the now-yearslong controversy over “faking” a Spanish accent and fudging her heritage in the media. To briefly summarize: Prior to getting called out on this behavior on social media in 2020, Hilaria, née Hillary Hayward-Thomas, claimed to hail from Spain, when in fact she grew up and attended school in Massachusetts. At her wedding to Alec in 2012, she wore a traditional mantilla veil as a “nod to her roots”; she gave all seven of her children Spanish names; and in public appearances and videos, she’d speak in a heavy accent, “forgetting” the English words for things like “cucumber” and “onion” with a fully committed “How you say …?”
“I’m raising my kids to be bilingual. I was raised bilingual. My nuclear family now lives over in Spain,” she tells the camera on The Baldwins, as a photo of her American parents in Spain flashes onscreen. “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. I love English. I also love Spanish. And when I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic. When I mix the two, that makes me normal!” This confessional is juxtaposed with footage of her speaking Spanish to her kids, who for the most part talk among themselves in English.
Regarding her very public outing as a non-spicy-white American, she says, “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 realize we are a mix of all these different things, and that’s gonna 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.”
Throughout the entire episode, Hilaria speaks English in an American accent with some ever-so-slight inflections, a voice that sounds a world away from the viral clips of her from 2020 and earlier. At one point in the episode, Alec asks her to slow down, because she’s “speaking English in a Spanish cadence.” At another point, she asks him what the word is for “Venus flytrap,” but that seems less like a cucumber-level affectation and more like she genuinely doesn’t know the word for Venus flytrap. Also, one of their four cats is named Paolo, and one of their two nannies is named Paola. If that means anything to you.
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