It’s Not Easy Being Alec Baldwin and Five Other Takeaways From ‘The Baldwins’
Alec Baldwin has won Emmys and been nominated for an Oscar. He’s thrived in comedy and in drama. He’s hosted a game show and hosted Saturday Night Live. But one thing he’d never done, until Sunday night, was star in a reality TV show. The Baldwins, the new TLC series featuring Baldwin and his family, couldn’t have come at a trickier — or, if you’re a cold-blooded cynic, better — time. Filmed last summer, it straddles the period Baldwin was on trial for manslaughter after he fired a loaded prop gun on the 2021 set of the movie Rust, accidentally killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Into this heightened atmosphere comes an army of TV cameras shadowing Baldwin, his wife Hilaria, their seven children aged 11 to two, and their eight pets around their five-bedroom New York City apartment and their second home in East Hampton. In the first episode, titled “Along Came Hilaria,” we see four of the boys get haircuts, the whole gang decorating a birthday cake, and the general chaos of a family with seven children, eight pets, and a celebrity patriarch in the midst of a high-profile criminal trial.
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Here are five things we learned:
Hilaria says Alec suffered from PTSD in the wake of the Rust shooting
To bring viewers up to speed on everything going on in the family’s life, The Baldwins shows footage of Alec on set during the filming of Rust, as well as a video clip of the actor being interviewed by investigators after the shooting, in which they inform him that Hutchins died. Alec is visibly disturbed by the news, pushing his chair back and clasping his hand to his face, stunned into silence.
While Hilaria acknowledges through tears that “watching Alec and his pain in no way is meant to compare with Halyna’s loss, with her son who has no mom,” Alec describes the pain of having to raise their young family amid the notoriety the incident has brought them.
“Everything was so different before this happened, and our lives are very, very different now,” Alec says. “Our children have been forced to recognize that, they’ve been forced to deal with that with us in their own way… This has been just surreal. I can’t believe we’re going through this.”
In interviews during the episode, Alec and Hilaria also share how Alec’s mental health declined over the course of the trial. There were days Alec says he didn’t want to get out of bed, because he was happier when asleep than when he was awake. Hilaria says he was diagnosed with PTSD and that, “in his darkest moments,” he would say, “If an accident had to have happened this day, why am I still here? Why couldn’t it have been me?”
Hilaria says pretending to be Spanish is very “normal”
Over the years, Hilaria — who was born Hillary Thomas in Boston, raised in Massachusetts, and attended college in New York City — has been criticized for speaking Spanish-accented English and allowing people to believe she was born in Spain. (She is fluent in Spanish, and her family vacationed in the country frequently when she was growing up.) In The Baldwins, she says she has not enjoyed people casting judgment on her for her Spanglish.
“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,” she says. “But it was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonging in multiple places and realized that we are a mix of all these different things on how we sound, and have an impact on how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms,” she explains. “That’s normal. That’s called being human.”
According to Hilaria, she’s raising her seven kids to also be bilingual, partially because her own family now lives in Spain. “I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language,” she says. “I think just growing up 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.”
Hilaria claims Alec has obsessive-compulsive disorder
Raising seven kids in one New York City apartment would be tough for anyone, but Hilaria notes it’s a special challenge for her husband, who she says has been diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive. To wit, The Baldwins shows Alec cleaning up after his kids and being very particular about the ways in which their toys are laid out. He talks about having obsessive-compulsive disorder and Hilaria discusses what it’s like living with Alec and his OCD.
“People throw the term OCD around very casually,” she says. “OCD is a real thing that’s really hard.”
When a producer says to Hilaria that she imagines having seven kids and eight pets is an interesting combo with OCD, Hilaria responds, “Yes, it was a curious choice that he made.”
The couple’s age gap isn’t a big deal to them
At 66, Alec is 26 years older than Hilaria. The Baldwins shows news clips of the media talking about that significant age gap, but the pair themselves say relationship harmony is all about where you are at a given time in your life, not the pure mathematics of age.
“I don’t believe that age is just a number,” Hilaria says. “[Alec] was very different when he was 26 years younger, and I probably will be very different when I am 26 years older, and I think if you respect that and you see your person where they are, see it for what it is, and then see if it works. And obviously it does for us.”
Alec was the one who wanted a big family
When Alec was married to actress Kim Basinger, they had daughter Ireland, who’s now 29 years old. But for Alec, that clearly wasn’t enough. Back when Alec and Hilaria started dating around 2011, Hilaria says he was the one who emphasized how important it was for him to have more kids.
“It all went really fast,” she says, noting that she was pregnant with their oldest daughter Carmen just months after their 2012 wedding. “When we met [Alec] really wanted to have kids. He wanted to make sure before we started seriously dating. He was like, ‘I need to have kids again. That is something I want to do.’ If I was somebody that said, ‘I love you and I don’t want to have kids,’ I don’t think that we would’ve made it, because that was something that was important for him.”
Whether he actually wanted quite this many kids is a point of contention. Alec says at the beginning of the episode, “Four kids, and I thought that was the outer limit… but we kept going,” as all of the children are yelling and running around their apartment.
Later, a producer asks him if he and Hilaria set out to have seven kids, to which he replies with a series of “No’s.”
“I never thought at my age,” he says. “Holy moly.”
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