Maggie Baird has shut down claims suggesting her daughter Billie Eilish is a “nepo baby”.
In an interview for Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year issue, the actress was asked about a recently resurfaced clip of her appearing in an episode of ’90s sitcom Friends.
At the time, some critics argued Maggie’s work in Hollywood proved that Billie benefitted from nepotism. However, the 65-year-old has now insisted that it simply wasn’t the case.
“I think it’s hilarious,” she smiled. “Because that came out, and it was like, ‘Oh, Billie is a nepo baby.’ And I’m like, ‘Did you know that I got that episode of Friends because I was about to lose my health insurance?'”
Maggie married actor Patrick O’Connell in 1995. They are also parents to songwriter and music producer Finneas O’Connell.
And while Maggie had experience in the acting world, she noted that navigating Billie’s success in the music business was an entirely different challenge.
“My husband and I are working-class actors. We eked out a meagre living, and it afforded us a lot of time with our kids, which was awesome. But the industry is primarily people like us or even people not even like us who couldn’t even do that,” the mother-of-two continued. “So when all of this happened to our kids, we’d never been on that side of it. 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. But that’s a very different life than on this side of the door where you’re suddenly playing in this different arena.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Maggie described how maintaining family life was important for Billie and Finneas as they entered the music industry.
“You step onstage in front of 100,000 people, and that’s an hour and a half, and then the rest of the time you’re at the dinner table and your brother is giving you s**t. The family part is the part that keeps it sane,” she added.
