Kim Basinger Calls Ex-Husband Alec Baldwin a ‘Challenge’

Kim Basinger is opening up about her divorce from Alec Baldwin and the effect it had on their daughter Ireland Baldwin. The L.A. Confidential actress, 68, and her daughter, 26, sat down for a candid interview on Facebook Watch’s Red Table Talk Wednesday, admitting that she and her ex didn’t exactly see “eye-to-eye” during a “very heavy-duty” and “very out loud” divorce. 

Co-parenting Ireland through that “very rough time” and through her struggles with anxiety has been difficult, Basinger admitted. “Uh, no. No, that was not – Alec’s a funny one,” she explained. “We’re all fine and we all get along, whatever. But he’s been – but he’s a challenge.” Continued Basinger, who was married to the Boss Baby actor from 1993 to 2002, “I mean, come on. We’ve had our challenges. And I don’t think Alec was emotionally or mentally available for that kind of talk.”

“Alec, you know, operates in a very different way in his life,” she continued, as Ireland jumped in to say her dad himself “deals with anxiety greatly.” The model continued that her father is is “someone who grew up in a family that would suppress that as well. Or tell him he’s weak for feeling that way.” Ireland also opened up about her own struggles with anxiety on Red Table Talk, revealing that she’s been hospitalized over 20 times due to her cardiophobia.

“When [my heart rate] starts getting really fast, even when I’m slightly nervous or if I exercise or anything, I start panicking to the point where I’m convinced, no matter what anyone says, that I’m going to have a heart attack and I have to go to a hospital,” she explained. “I’ve had maybe over 20 hospital visits in my life.”

Earlier this month, Ireland took to Instagram to address the messages she was getting in the wake of Alec and Hilaria Baldwin’s announcement that they were expecting their seventh child together and open up about her relationship as an adult with her dad. “I get countless messages from people who are kind of alarmingly obsessed with my father and his family,” she wrote at the time. “I think a lot of people assume my take on any of this, well here it is for free – it’s none of my business. … I don’t care.”