It was way back in 2011 that Alec Baldwin met his future wife, Hilaria. The actor was smitten and popped the question the following year. They tied the knot after a brief engagement and welcomed their first child together, daughter Carmen Gabriela, in 2013. Over the years that followed, the couple would have more children — a lot more. “He’s always asking me for more kids,” the mother of seven told People in February 2025, confirming she was officially done with making babies. “They’re so cute,” she told the magazine, “But my body’s really tired.”

A yoga instructor who rebranded herself as a social media influencer, she’s had some moments over the years that have raised eyebrows and stirred up controversy. Comedian Amy Schumer, in fact, roasted the Baldwins for their “Von Trapp amount of children” in a 2023 comedy special (per Us Weekly), but there’s been far more oddness about the “30 Rock” star’s wife than having a ton of kids.  

In early 2025, the Baldwins opened up their lives for a TLC reality show, which only served to remind everyone about some of the strange things about her. To find out more, read on for a rundown of some weird details about Hilaria Baldwin.

Before taking on her husband’s surname, Hilaria Baldwin was known by an entirely different name. In fact, she was born Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas. She legally changed her name from Hillary to Hilaria Hayward-Thomas back in 2010, the year before she met her future spouse Alec Baldwin. How do we know this? A Reddit user with a sleuthing streak dug up the actual name-change document from the New York County Civil Court. 

In a 2020 interview with The New York Times, she claimed that she’d been going by Hillary until about 2009 before shifting to Hilaria — insisting that was the name that members of her family had been calling her for most of her life. “There is not something I’m doing wrong, and I think there is a difference between hiding and creating a boundary,” she said of her name change. 

She also addressed her name alteration in a 2020 Instagram video, which she subsequently deleted. “I think we can all be really clear that it’s the same name, just a few letters difference,” she said, as reported by Today.com. “I think we shouldn’t be so upset about it. Whatever you guys want to call me, I will respond to both.”

Ever since entering the public eye, Hilaria Baldwin has intermittently spoken with a Spanish accent. In a 2018 interview with Hola! (which has subsequently vanished from the site), Hilaria Baldwin said (via Vanity Fair) that she was born in Spain, and “has made certain to raise her children with her native language, Spanish.” In addition, VF also pointed out that her bio on the website of her talent agency stated, “Baldwin was born in Mallorca, Spain, and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.” 

When questions began arising about the veracity of her Spanish heritage, numerous people came forward to insist that the erstwhile Hillary Hayward-Thomas was born in Massachusetts, not Mallorca (although her parents had moved there, but not until 2011). A genealogist tweeted that she’d done a quick family tree for Baldwin. “Found English, Irish, French Canadian, German, and Slovak. Some deep New England roots. No Spain in sight.” 

This raised some obvious questions. Most notably, people began wondering why she’d been trying to pass herself off as Spanish when she wasn’t — and where that striking Spanish accent came from.

Digging into the controversy between Amy Schumer and Hilaria Baldwin, Us Weekly reported that Schumer joked in her 2023 comedy special that “Hilaria from España is actually Hillary from Boston.” The controversy over Baldwin’s scandal reignited when she and her husband posted a video on Instagram announcing their upcoming reality show — and she spoke in accent-free English. 

As many comments to that post pointed out, that wasn’t always the case. Way back in 2012, she appeared on “Good Morning America,” and spoke with a mild Spanish accent while giving a yoga demonstration. In another interview during that same period, with “Extra,” all traces of that accent had vanished. However, when she spoke with reporters outside her home — shortly after her husband, Alec Baldwin was charged with the fatal shooting of a crew member while making the western “Rust” — her Spanish accent was surprisingly pronounced. Meanwhile, in a subsequent interview with “Extra,” she’s also seen speaking with a thick Spanish accent.

So what gives? “I was raised bilingual,” she said during the debut episode of “The Baldwins.” “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 … But 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 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.”

There is no question that Hilaria Baldwin is fluent in both English and Spanish, demonstrating the latter when she was interviewed by Hola! TV on a red carpet. However, the strangest moment in the ongoing controversy about her ever-shifting accent took place in 2020, when she appeared on “Today” for a cooking segment. 

While demonstrating how to make gazpacho, she feigned not remembering the English word for a very common vegetable. “We have very few ingredients,” Baldwin said. “We have tomatoes, we have — how do you say in English? — cucumber …”

Interestingly, that wasn’t the only time that she had a similar memory lapse while cooking on camera. In a clip obtained by the Daily Mail, Baldwin was whipping up a traditional Spanish dish in her kitchen with a friend. “I learned this from when I was a kid, don’t look it up online because you’ll learn something different,” she said, once again displaying a prominent Spanish accent. “My husband hates … cebolla,” she continued, with her friend offering the English equivalent: onion. “I forgot it,” she said the word “onion” somehow vanishing from her memory.

Beyond her accent and heritage claims, another odd moment from Hilaria Baldwin came courtesy of her husband. In early 2023, Alec Baldwin shared a video on Instagram, in celebration of his wife’s birthday. This was no mere birthday tribute, but a plea to all his followers on the social media platform. “May I ask you a favor?” he wrote in the caption accompanying the video.

“My wife is just, it seems like she’s just centimeters shy of one million followers on Instagram,” Baldwin said. “And I would like to ask you, as a birthday gift, or even just [a] gesture to my wife, would you follow her on Instagram?” He continued by declaring his love, and then added, “I would like a really great, great surge of you to follow my wife on Instagram to say ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. Would you do that for me? Would you follow my wife on Instagram? Please?”

The actor’s entreaty to his fans did not move as many of them to take action as he’d hoped. As of March 2025, her account boasted 974,000 followers — still more than 25,000 short of hitting that million mark.

While Hilaria Baldwin may or may not someday crack a million followers on Instagram, she’s certainly gone out of her way to provide content on social media that can only be described as … let’s say unique. That was the case with a photo she shared on the platform, ostensibly intended to express her relief that Alec Baldwin’s “Rust” shooting charges took their biggest turn yet when manslaughter charges had been dropped. 

In that photo, she’s seen perched on her husband’s lap, curled up like an infant in the fetal position. Writing in Jezebel, Kady Ruth Ashcraft had some thoughts. “The curled up pose begs to suggest that she is ‘baby’ despite Alec being the one who was facing charges — and their babies being the actual babies,” she wrote, then adding this nugget of wisdom: “Personally, this is not a pose I would choose if my husband was almost twice my age.”

Hilaria Baldwin used to teach at Yoga Vida in NYC. One of her classes was the scene of a 2013 mishap when a student, Spencer Wolff, attempted a handstand and wound up losing his balance. He fell into a window (on the sixth floor, no less), shattering the glass and slicing open his leg. Wolff sued, alleging his injury wouldn’t have occurred had the overcrowded studio not been crammed with too many people. “It gets insanely crowded there,” a yoga participant told the New York Post of Baldwin’s highly popular classes. 

After the lawsuit was settled, she happened to run into Wolff, who was walking with a friend, Zev Starr-Tambor. “Hilaria recognized him and proceeded to rant about how he traumatized her,” Wolff’s friend, Zev Starr-Tambor, told Page Six. “Spencer said, ‘But I was the one who was hurt. I’m the one with the leg that still hurts.’ She went on, ‘But yes you traumatized me, the experience was so terrible.'”

As Starr-Tambor said in an interview with The Sun, he recalled the whole exchange as being ultra-weird, considering that Woff was the party who’d been injured. “It was completely aggressive,” he said. “He froze and let the wrath sort of pass and said, ‘I didn’t want to traumatize you, I just got hurt. Look at my scar.’ But she continued berating him.” Tambor-Starr also offered his own observation about her shifting accent. “I took her classes for years and she always did her yoga classes in what I assumed was a Spanish or European accent,” he added.

It’s hardly a newsflash that most married couples, if not all of them, disagree from time to time. When that does occur, decorum typically dictates that marital spats take place behind closed doors. 

That, however, is not a dictum to which Hilaria Baldwin ascribes. She made that clear as crystal in February 2020, when she shared a photo on Instagram in which she was angrily getting in the face of her husband Alec Baldwin. In the caption, she told her social media followers that the photo was taken at an event nearly a decade earlier, and chronicled their first fight — which just happened to take place in public. “You got frustrated with someone on the red carpet and walked away…I had to waddle in this mermaid tail dress after you and didn’t like being left behind,” she said, recalling the moment. “It wasn’t very dramatic, but I think it was my first Hilaria glare that I gave you,” she added, revealing that the photographer who’d taken the shot printed out a copy for her. According to Baldwin, the photo is displayed in the entry of their home — to serve as a warning to her husband. “As a reminder for him to behave,” she wrote.

Parenting seven young children cannot be easy, yet it’s fair to say that carrying each one for nine months and then giving birth is no picnic either. Yet Hilaria Baldwin has done it with aplomb, making the process of delivering six consecutive babies (daughter MariLu was born via surrogacy) look easy.

However, could there be chicanery at play? According to a subreddit devoted to her (r/HilariaBaldwin), boasting 25,000 members, there’s a suspicion that she didn’t actually birth all those kids, and had utilized the services of a surrogate more than just once, as reported by BuzzFeed News. 

As that report pointed out, it’s not much of a stretch for those who believe that she’d fibbed about being Spanish to believe that she faked her pregnancies as well. While there are some on Reddit who claim she’s worn a Moonbump (a lifelike prosthetic that makes whoever’s wearing it look pregnant) there’s been no proof whatsoever that she’s lying about having her babies.

In a clip from the series premiere of TLC’s “The Baldwins” (via US Weekly), Alec Baldwin revealed that he was severely allergic to cats. He found that out when staying with a pal when he headed to Hollywood in the early 1980s. “My friend Ronnie had cats when I first went to Los Angeles in 1983. I would stay with Ronnie on a futon but it had a frame,” Baldwin said in the episode. “Underneath the frame on the floor, you could see enormous tumbleweeds of cat hair.”

It was at that point that he suffered an asthma attack, one so severe that he had to seek treatment in a hospital, one of the tragic details of Alec Baldwin’s life. “I got a shot of epinephrine from the doctors there,” he said. Naturally, owning cats was a dealbreaker for him, something he informed wife Hilaria about early in their relationship. “I said to my wife, ‘We can’t have cats ever.’ She goes out and buys four cats,” he recalled. 

While he told the story for laughs, viewers could only be curious about why, given the severity of her husband’s allergy, she would ignore his health in such a way. “So everywhere I go and every corner I turn, there is a cat,” he observed. “They’re like, ‘Greetings.’ And I’m like, ‘S***.'”