Don’t call Billie Eilish a nepo baby. During a recent cover story for Glamour, Eilish’s mom Maggie Baird sat down for a conversation with Selena Gomez, Beyoncé, and Travis Kelce’s mothers, and shut down social media claims that her daughter is a “nepo baby” because of Baird’s connection to Hollywood.
“I think it’s hilarious,” Baird told the publication. Her response came after she was asked about her cameo in a 1999 episode of Friends, which recently went viral online, and sparked the “nepo baby” allegations.
“It was like, ‘Oh, Billie is a nepo baby,’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Did you know that I got that episode of Friends because I was about to lose my health insurance?’”
Baird continued by saying she and Eilish’s father Patrick O’Connell were and still “are working class actors.”
“We eked out a meager living, and it afforded us a lot of time with our kids, which was awesome,” she said. “But the industry is primarily people like us or even people not even like us who couldn’t even do that.”
“When all of this happened to our kids, we’d never been on that side of it,” she added.
Baird has appeared in several minor roles in shows and films throughout her acting career, including in Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2000, a role as “Mother” in two episodes of Birds of Prey in 2002, and a single-episode appearance in Six Feet Under in 2005. She’s also voiced characters in video games.
“I think that people don’t really understand there’s a whole industry of people who are creative and they’re working and they’re struggling, and they make perfectly happy lives, and they feel creative, and they feel fulfilled,” Baird said. “But that’s a very different life than on this side of the door where you’re suddenly playing in this different arena.”
