Alec Baldwin opened up about his anxieties about comments that former President Donald Trump made about the shooting accident on the set of Rust in a new interview with CNN on Friday, August 19. The actor admitted that he was ‘nervous’ after Trump, 76, had suggested that Baldwin, 64, had intentionally shot Halyna Hutchins, who died in the accident.
The Departed star seemed especially worried about Trump’s comments when considering the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol, where his supporters stormed the building. “The former president of the United States said, ‘He probably shot her on purpose,’ to me was the only time that I was worried about what was going to happen,” Baldwin told CNN. “Here was Trump, who instructed people to commit acts of violence and he was pointing the finger at me, and he was saying I was responsible for the death.”
Baldwin pointed to the death of Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer who was killed during the January 6 attack, when thinking about what Trump’s supporters could do to him. “I’m nervous that a bunch of people who were instructed by the former president to go to the Capitol, and they killed a law enforcement officer. They killed somebody,” he said. “You don’t think that I think to myself, ‘Are some of those people going to come and kill me?’”
Shortly after the shooting, Trump had made a morbid suggestion that the shooting may have been Baldwin’s fault in a November 2021 appearance on a conservative podcast. “But even if it was loaded, and that’s a weird thing — maybe he loaded it,” he said, per The Hill. “He’s a cuckoo-bird, he’s a nutjob. And usually, when there’s somebody like that, you know, in my opinion, he had something to do with it.”
During the interview, Baldwin spoke about the stress he’s under following the accident and investigation, especially with strangers coming after him. “There is just this torrent of people attacking me who don’t know the facts,” he said.
Besides speaking about Trump, Baldwin also spoke about members of the crew who were responsible for handling the firearm that led to the fatal accident. He also mourned Halyna’s death, and he vowed to not use real guns in movies ever again. “That she died, that’s the worst thing of all. Somebody died, and it was avoidable. It was so unnecessary,” he said.