Perhaps it is time for celebrities to stop complaining about the media invading their privacy, or at least be a little more honest about their oft-stated desire to be left alone.
Several high-profile figures — via social media, books and TV shows, and sometimes all of the above — keep invading their privacy to sell us products and/or themselves, often with the additional intent of laundering damaged public reputations.
In the latest trailer for her upcoming Netflix show, the Duchess of Sussex is admirably blatant, elucidating why her brand American Riviera Orchard has been renamed As Ever.
Before her much-ballyhooed jam splatters the globe, here come the actor Alec Baldwin and his wife, Hilaria, emoting on cue in their new reality show The Baldwins. The name harks back to the mix of domestic drama and chaotic jollity from that OG of the genre, The Osbournes, and features Baldwin, 66, Hilaria, 41, and their seven kids: Carmen, 11, Rafael, 9, Leonardo, 8, Romeo, 6, Eduardo and Marilu, 4, and Ilaria, 2. The show follows them between their New York City apartment and palatial pad in the Hamptons. There are also two nannies (who deserve medals for valor), four dogs and four cats — despite Baldwin being decidedly allergic to the last.
In The Osbournes Ozzy was only burdened with the very rock-star mantle of biting the head off a live bat. The Baldwins contends with a far grimmer tragedy: Baldwin’s involvement in the accidental death of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust in October 2021. Baldwin was positioning a revolver during filming when it went off, killing Hutchins and injuring the director Joel Souza.
Viewers can judge for themselves the taste and wisdom of The Baldwins using this incident as a central storyline. The incident’s impact on his life and career is a significant element of the show — a multi-episode arena to offer contrition, reveal personal pain and seek absolution and atonement. (A different documentary about the incident will also premiere on Hulu in March.)
The first scenes of the first episode balance the loud and merry chaos of family life and son Raf’s ninth birthday party — cake being made, kids leaping everywhere — with the specter of Baldwin at that moment facing being recharged with manslaughter.
The show follows Alec, Hilaria, and their seven kids. There are also two nannies (who deserve medals for valor), four dogs and four cats—despite Baldwin being decidedly allergic to the last.
Tonally, the show goes for some dramatic shifts. Family life looks happy, loud and a minute-to-minute logistical nightmare, especially with Baldwin’s OCD trying to bring order — he’s seen organizing the freezer and arranging shoes and toys — to the constant chaos. Hilaria says the legal nightmare has only worsened it.
We quickly get into Baldwin’s trauma, Hilaria’s trauma and their worries about the effects on their kids, before hitting all the other tabloid hot buttons around them: the age difference, the accusations when they got together that she was a gold-digger, him having so many kids at such an advanced age and her inexplicable Spanish accent (she was born and raised in Boston).
“I understand Alec because I have gotten to understand Alec and feel the world very much misunderstands Alec,” Hilaria says. “He is a very tender soul. He’s very raw, especially now.”
Baldwin says: “This past year was so hard. With the kids it’s tough. I have one overriding thought, I have one overriding concern, and that is letting seven children know that I love them.”
Baldwin has consistently denied responsibility for what occurred on the set of Rust and — after filming ended — a judge dismissed a charge of involuntary manslaughter against him, ruling that New Mexico prosecutors had withheld evidence that could have helped Baldwin’s defence.
“I understand Alec because I have gotten to understand Alec and feel the world very much misunderstands Alec,” Hilaria says. “He is a very tender soul.”
In January Baldwin filed a lawsuit accusing prosecutors and law enforcement officials of waging a “malicious prosecution” against him after the shooting. (The film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to jail for 18 months.)
The Baldwins say they are keenly aware of the suffering of Hutchins’s widower, Matthew, and their child. We see the moment Baldwin is told in a police interview of Hutchins’ death. He looks stunned.
“Watching Alec and his pain, in no way is it meant to compare to Halyna’s loss with her son, who has no mom,” Hilaria says. “It breaks my heart.”
She adds: “I believe that all we can do is try to put one foot in front of the other and try to make our kids happy, and so that’s what we’re doing … Halyna lost her life in the most unthinkable tragedy, a son lost his mom. We are going to feel and carry this pain for ever, this will be a part of our family story.”
“This has been just surreal. I can’t believe I’m going through this,” Baldwin says, turning to his wife. “I always feel more in pain for you than me.” He adds that he has lain in bed and not wanted to get up, that he is happier asleep than awake.
“Everyone close to Alec has seen his mental health decline,” Hilaria says. “He was diagnosed with PTSD. He says in his darkest moments, ‘If an accident had to have happened this day, why am I still here? Why couldn’t it have been me?’”
What keeps them going, Hilaria says, is trying to ensure their kids are happy and protected from the surrounding trauma. “I honestly, from the bottom of my soul, I don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t have you and these kids,” Baldwin says to Hilaria. “Sometimes I say, ‘Why do we have seven kids?’ and it’s to help carry me and you through this situation.”
The show marks Baldwin’s most emphatic return to the public realm since the Rust tragedy. Last weekend he appeared briefly in Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary show to introduce a package of the NBC show’s best parodies of TV commercials. A 17-time SNL host, he is rightly lauded for his brilliant impersonations of Donald Trump.
“Sometimes I say, ‘Why do we have seven kids?’ and it’s to help carry me and you through this situation,” says Alec.
Baldwin is very at home in Studio 8H; after a checkered film career, his best-known role came in Tina Fey’s acclaimed sitcom 30 Rock — the show taking the colloquial name of NBC’s legendary towering New York home — playing the drily pompous, vain and manipulative Jack Donaghy.
The eldest of the four Baldwin brothers (after him come Daniel, William/Billy and Stephen), Baldwin has won three Primetime Emmy awards, three Golden Globe awards, and eight Screen Actors Guild awards; he’s also been nominated for an Oscar, a Bafta and a Tony award (the latter for his role as Stanley Kowalski in a 1992 Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire).
Baldwin’s first marriage to Kim Basinger ended in divorce in 2002 after nine years; in 2007 he hit the headlines after leaving their daughter, Ireland, an abusive phone message. Long reconciled with her dad, Ireland is 29 and gave birth to her first child in 2023.
Baldwin told The Times in 2010: “Marriage isn’t the problem; the way we divorce is the problem.” He and Hilaria, a yoga instructor and author, began dating after meeting in a restaurant 14 years ago. “I had been married, got divorced. I dated another woman off and on for quite a while. I’m like, ‘I don’t want to have a girlfriend. I don’t,’” Baldwin told People.
“And so when I met [Hilaria], I was really like, ‘Oh God. I don’t want to do this …’ But I mean, I fell madly in love with her. And I told my friends and they were like, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ. It’s like a miracle.’”
Of their age difference, Hilaria says in the show: “I don’t believe age is just a number. He was very different when he was 26 years younger and I will probably be very different when I am 26 years older.” She thinks we should “respect where people are, see if it works”. And for them it does. Of his own ageing, Baldwin notes, “I have no time to waste, I’m worried.”
“I love you most when you’re asleep,” Baldwin tells his wife in the show, who gives him the finger in response.
In the show they have a mini on-camera squall over the prenup. Hilaria says she didn’t understand when she signed it. The Spanish accent re-emerges as her voice quickens. “You’re speaking English in a Spanish cadence, which is always perilous for me,” Baldwin says. “Slow down, I can’t understand you.”
Hilaria says she was raised bilingual and is raising her children to be the same. Having her accent so mocked took her to “a dark place” but, she adds, “growing up, speaking two languages is extremely special. I love English. I also love Spanish. When I mix the two it doesn’t make me inauthentic … it makes me normal”.
In the first episode of the show the family head to the Hamptons, the summer refuge for New York’s super-rich, Baldwin somehow left driving a car with only the cats he is allergic to for company.
And so The Baldwins’ tone is set: drama, light and shade, chaos, merry and otherwise. It is perhaps a natural brand extension for an actor with such a dramatic professional and personal past. He twinkles and stares as ambiguously at the cameras in his own home as he did on 30 Rock.
“I crave a completely private life,” Baldwin told The Times in 2010. He has a funny way of showing it.
The Baldwins will be available to stream on Max beginning Monday, February 24
Tim Teeman is a senior editor and writer at the Daily Beast
