During their 11-year marriage, Hilaria and Alec Baldwin have made a lot of headlines both together and separately. But before making the news for more serious scandals like Hilaria’s nationality controversy and the shooting on the set of Alec’s movie Rust, the Baldwins’ relationship was gossip fodder because of their age gap. At 65, Alec is 26 years older that his 39-year-old wife.
The couple have addressed their age difference before, but in a new interview, Hilaria defended it in a surprising way. Read on to find out why she sometimes feels like her husband’s mother and what she has to say to critics who claim she has “daddy issues.”
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In a new interview with Romper, Hilaria explained that she enjoys taking care of others—including her seven children—and said that this aspect of her personality is the reason why she became a yoga teacher.
Her caretaking also extends to her husband. “Am I his mommy? Sometimes I’m his mommy. Sometimes,” Hilaria said. “At the beginning of our relationship, everyone was like, ‘She must have daddy issues because she’s married to somebody older.’ But it’s actually the opposite.”
Elsewhere in the interview—which focuses on motherhood—Alec talked about his connection with Hilaria, with whom he shares seven children.
“I admire her, and I have faith in her integrity,” the Departed actor said. “She’s incredibly decent, and she’s obviously a beautiful woman. I’m madly in love with her. And she can be a gigantic pain in the [expletive] sometimes, but that’s marriage. But I feel like I know a lot of friends of mine who get into a routine and everything’s about their kids. Who has more of a reason to make everything about our kids but us with so many, yet we still try to hold onto some time for ourselves.”
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On a 2022 episode of her podcast, Witches Anonymous, Hilaria admitted that she made assumptions about couples like her and Alec before they got together.
“This older man wants some young bimbo with no opinions whatsoever, and that younger woman is obviously a gold digger, and she obviously doesn’t even care and is just like, ‘Okay, whatever I hope you die and I’m going to take all your money,” Hilaria said she used to think (via E! News).
But, she realized after falling in love with Alec that those were misconceptions.
“Now that I’m in that relationship and people will say those things about me regularly, I realize oh my God, why was this trained into my head,” the former Extra host said. “Why was I so judgmental about other people who are literally just finding love? Maybe that love looks different from your love or from what I thought love might be but it doesn’t make it not valid.”
“We do not always agree,” Alec said of their parenting styles on Literally! with Rob Lowe in 2020 (via Today). “My wife prevails, if you will, but we do not always agree because I’m still much older than my wife.”
Alec—who made headlines in the past for his treatment of daughter Ireland Baldwin with ex-wife Kim Basinger—went on to explain that he had a different experience with his own parents compared to what Hilaria wants to give to their children.
“My goal wasn’t to marry a much younger woman,” he continued. “I met a woman I fell in love with and she was a unique person. … I come from a time, my dad was a very tough guy, and he would just look at you with that look … We were terrified of my dad. He was a really tough guy. With me, my wife lectures me more than my children. My wife is like, ‘Don’t look at them like that, Alec! That look is not good.'” He added, “I hit the jackpot as far as that’s concerned, because I wound up having a lot of kids with a woman who’s a great mom.”
Alec and Hilaria have seven children together, who range in age from nine years old to nine months. In 2019, Hilaria told PopSugar that Alec wanted to have kids not long into their marriage, because of his age. When they got married, Hilaria was 28 and Alec was 54.
“It was important to him to have kids soon, which I think was mostly because of our age difference,” she said. “After we got married, I originally said, ‘Why don’t we wait, we just got married.’ Then five months into our marriage, I found out I was pregnant with Carmen, and of course, I was really excited to be a mom. It was one of those things where it kind of crept up on me a bit. I was breastfeeding when I found out I was pregnant with Rafa, and the same happened with Leo.”
In her new interview with Romper, Hilaria said of nine-month-old Ilaria, “This is probably, most definitely, almost completely my last baby.” But, she admitted that part of the reason she and Alec have so many children is because they aren’t using birth control. “Every single time I have a baby, my OB writes down the vasectomy doctor on a Post-it, and I bring it home to Alec,” she said. “He hasn’t done it yet.”