Alec Baldwin, husband to noted white woman Hilaria Baldwin, decided to deactivate his Twitter account this week after once again getting his feelings hurt by people reminding him that his wife pretended to be Spanish for the past decade. After a recent Twitter thread exposed the inconsistency of her purported Spanish background, Hilaria Baldwin was forced to clarify that she’s actually a white woman from Boston. Supposedly, all of the confusion about where Hilaria was really from was because she “split her childhood” between the U.S. and Spain and speaks both English and Spanish, which, if true, seems like something that could easily have been “clarified” years ago.
The incident that led Baldwin to rage quit Twitter occurred earlier this week after he tweeted “switching accents? That sounds... fascinating” in reference to actress Gillian Anderson’s shifting accent as she accepted the Golden Globe for her performance in The Crown. However, commenters were quick to clarify that despite being from the U.S., Anderson spent a portion of her childhood living in London and currently lives there—which is a little different than a white girl from New England misleading people about her background in order to seem more interesting.
Apparently, this was the last straw for Baldwin, according to a ten-minute-long video he posted on IGTV on Wednesday evening. I will not be embedding his Instagram video in this blog post because it is against my personal values to subject anyone to ten minutes of Alec Baldwin talking in the year 2021, but it involves him complaining about how “you can’t do irony in the United States anymore”—a sister to the classic male comedian refrain that “the U.S. is too politically correct for comedy these days.”
Although he didn’t directly name Gillian Anderson, Baldwin did vaguely talk around the “joke”, saying: “That comment was made just to illustrate the point that I find that multicultural expressions of anyone, whatever country, language, music, food, clothing, art, whatever of those expressions are important to you, that’s your business.”
Ah yes, the commonly used and definitely not nonsensical phrase “multicultural expressions.”
Baldwin followed up that perplexing and meaningless statement with a rant about how much he hates Twitter, calling it a place “where all the assholes in the United States and beyond go to get their advanced degrees in assholiness.” Honestly, that’s a pretty accurate description. [LA Times]
The gossip blogs (and the entirety of Twitter dot com) are eagerly awaiting Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey airing this Sunday. In addition to talking about the racism she experienced in the U.K. and her battles with the tabloids, a TV insider claims that Markle will also open up about the mental health struggles she experienced before she and Harry decided to quit the royal family altogether. Trailers for the interview show Markle seeming to say that life inside the royal family was “almost unsurvivable.” “What Meghan says is very, very serious and upsetting,” the source told Page Six. [Page Six]
- Beyoncé’s father, Matthew Knowles, should probably check himself before he insults his daughter’s protégés. [Bossip]
- Former Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay says she’s accepted Chris Harrison’s apology because “it’s what she needs to do to move forward with her life,” which sounds decidedly different than forgiving him. [TMZ]
- Lucy Hale and Skeet Ulrich are two adults who are dating. [Us Weekly]