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Finneas O’Connell denies he and Billie Eilish were helped by their parents’ entertainment industry connections

By | Published on Tuesday 25 February 2020

Billie Eilish

Finneas O’Connell has hit back at claims that he and his sister, Billie Eilish, have only had success as musicians due to their parents’ connections in the entertainment industry. As opposed to, you know, working really hard for several years and being better at it than everyone else.

The siblings’ parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, are – as a cursory glance at Eilish’s Wikipedia page will tell you – both LA-based actors, so it’s clear why people might assume family connections played a part in their children’s success.

Among her credits, Baird has played Additional Voices in ‘Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas’, while – after 35 years as an actor – O’Connell scored a role in blockbuster movie ‘Iron Man’ in 2003, playing Unnamed Reporter. So, as you can see, they are big Hollywood movers and shakers.

A scroll down Finneas’s Wikipedia page adds another layer of information, stating that as well as being actors, his parents are “also musicians” – citing two articles that provide little more to go on. Maggie Baird did self-release an album in 2009 though.

It was the “also musicians” line on Finneas’s Wikipedia page that was screengrabbed and posted in a now deleted tweet by a former Pitchfork and Rolling Stone writer yesterday, who presented it as evidence that the siblings had cheated their way to the top. Responding, Finneas wrote: “During my lifetime, our parents were never able to fully financially support us off of their work as actors. Our dad worked twelve hour days, seven days a week as a construction worker for Mattel and our mom was a teacher. Our parents gave us love but knew no one in the record industry”.

He added: “I paid off their mortgage last year and Billie pays them each salaries to tour with us full time, though they have told us many times they would work for us for free. Anyone who saw us tour in 2019 knows our dad insists on sweeping the stage each night before we perform”.

Ah, so perhaps their career was funded by those shady execs in the sweeping industry in order to get brooms seen more prominently in public. That’ll be it.



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