Ireland Baldwin is taking time to acknowledge her privilege in the wake of Lily-Rose Depp’s headline-making stance on nepotism in Hollywood.
Depp, the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, stirred controversy earlier this month after shrugging off the implication that she received preferential treatment from film casting and modeling agencies because of her famous parents.
“I know my childhood didn’t look like everybody’s childhood, and it’s a very particular thing to deal with, but it’s also the only thing that I know,” she told Elle magazine. “It’s weird to me to reduce somebody to the idea that they’re only there because it’s a generational thing. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Not surprisingly, Depp’s thoughts on so-called “nepotism” or “nepo babies” ― a term condescendingly applied to children born into celebrity families ― drew a blistering response from others in the modeling and acting industries as well as online.
Baldwin, the daughter of actors Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, offered a more tempered view in a series of short videos posted to her TikTok account last week. After acknowledging that Depp is “very capable of being a model” and has “proven herself in a lot of ways,” she added, “I would never have become a model if it weren’t for who my parents were.”