Nepo Baby of the Week: Leave Maya Rudolph Alone
Maya Rudolph didn’t mean to make waves this week when she sat down with Dax Shepard for an episode of Armchair Expert, but alas, sometimes you don’t choose The Discourse™. Sometimes it chooses you.
It all started almost an hour into the episode, when Rudolph and Shepard were talking about their families, the biz, and their respective approaches to their careers. It was then that Rudolph’s famous family came up. Her mother was venerated soul singer Minnie Riperton, and her father is music producer Richard Rudolph. Riperton died in 1979 at the age of 31, when Maya was only 7 years old.
When Shepard noted that Rudolph seems to have a pretty healthy relationship with her career, she attributed part of that to how her parents raised her. In doing so, she accidentally ignited a nepo discourse that, frankly, seems pretty unfair.