A new video of Hilaria Baldwin seeming to forget the English word for “onion” is getting diced by haters online.
The wife of actor Alec Baldwin publicly presented herself as Spanish for years, often speaking with a Spanish accent during appearances. But in 2020, after a huge online kerfuffle, it was discovered that, although she’s spent a lot of time in Spain and is bilingual, she’s actually American. The New York Times reported that same year that she was known as Hillary Hayward-Thomas until 2009, and she was born and raised in Boston.
Yet, despite the revelation, Baldwin may be keeping up the act — or at least that’s what seems to be happeningin a video of Baldwin cooking that was recently posted on X, formerly Twitter, by the pop culture account Pop Crave.
It should be noted that it’s not exactly clear when the video was filmed. The video Pop Crave posted on X was “obtained exclusively” by the Daily Mail, and the tabloid claims that in the video Baldwin is cooking for “her holiday guests,” which implies this happened recently. No further information was provided, but the video on the Daily Mail’s website does contain an Instagram handle for a private account.
In the video, Baldwin can be seen speaking in a heavy Spanish accent while cooking a dish with tortillas.
“I learned this from when I was a kid. Don’t look it up online because you’ll learn something different,” Baldwin said to a male friend who was cooking alongside her.
While continuing to talk about her dish, Baldwin spoke about how she had to alter her recipe a bit for her spouse.
“My husband hates … cebollas,” Baldwin said while looking to her friend to help her translate the Spanish word into English.
“Onions,” he quickly says.
“Thanks, cebolla,” Baldwin said while continuing to describe how she adapts the dish for her husband.
Most people on X were pretty perplexed that Baldwin was still appropriating elements of Spanish heritage — even after her true identity was revealed.
But some X users sympathized with her struggle to remember the English word for cebollas.
“My parents raised my brother and me with two cultures, American and Spanish, and I feel a true sense of belonging to both,” she wrote on Instagram. “The way I’ve spoken about myself and my deep connection to two cultures could have been better explained ― I should have been more clear and I’m sorry.”
Despite presenting herself as Spanish, Baldwin told the Times in 2020 that she’s always been honest about her Boston roots — and blamed others for mislabeling her as Spanish.
She decided to nail down this point by sharing the way she met her husband in 2011 in a vegan restaurant. According to Hilaria Baldwin, she was speaking in Spanish to an Argentinian couple sitting next to her future spouse.
“I walked by him,” she told the Times.
Then, she said, he called out to her.
“‘Who are you, I must know you, I must know you,’” she recalled. “He said, ‘Where are you from?’ And I said, ‘I’m from Boston.’ That was the first thing I said, that has always been my narrative.”
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Despite this, the “30 Rock” star did tell David Letterman in 2013 that his “wife is from Spain.”