“Let’s go, let’s go,” Alec Baldwin says at the beginning of an understandably tense interview with reporters on the side of the road in Manchester, Vermont, where Baldwin and his family have been spending time since the accidental shooting death of Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust in New Mexico.
Outside of a series of tweets, Baldwin has made no public statements since the incident in which a prop gun he was told was “cold” killed the film’s cinematographer. The unscheduled interview is a compelling and sad look at a family wrapped up in a tragedy.
When asked about “what’s going on” with the case, Baldwin curtly replied that he had “been ordered by the sheriff’s department in Santa Fe” not to comment due to it being an “active investigation.”
“A woman died,” he reminded them, before adding “she was my friend, she was my friend.” He went on to explain that the day he arrived in Santa Fe, he took Hutchins and director Joel Souza to dinner.
“We were a very, very—” he began to say before his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, already pointing a mobile phone in the direction of the reporters, whispered something to him. “Excuse me,” he said to her sharply before she backed out of the frame.
After Alec reiterated that he could not make any comments about the case, he asked, “what other questions do you have?” At that point, a reporter from an outlet that the Guardian has identified as BackGrid, “a global celebrity news agency,” stumbled on remembering the name of the late cinematographer.
“Halyna! Her name is Halyna!” Hilaria fired back with no shortage of disgust. “If you’re spending this much time waiting for us, you should know her name!”
“You don’t know her name? Come on,” Alec added with an I can’t believe this guy expression. He quickly turned serious to say that he had met with the woman’s widower and son. He described them as “mortified.”
“No details,” Hilaria intervened.
Alec then turned to her. “Do me a favor? I’m going to answer the questions,” he said.
He is in contact with the family, Alec noted, and he called the incident “one in a trillion.” He said he couldn’t predict if he would ever again work on a film set that involves firearms, but encouraged the industry to continue looking at making changes to gun safety measures. Production on Rust will not continue, he said, and he referred to questions about his future projects as “irrelevant to what we are talking about.”
Alec then asked the reporters to effectively buzz off. “My kids are in the car crying,” he said.
“Because you guys are following them, and they know,” Hilaria added.
“As a courtesy to you, I came to talk to you,” Alec added. “I talk to the cops every day.”
Last week, director Adam Egypt Mortimer, who worked with Hutchins on the film Archenemy, wrote a remembrance of her for V.F.
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