Alec Baldwin Hits Back at George Clooney's Comments About Gun Safety After 'Rust' Shooting
Alec Baldwin is hitting back at George Clooney.
On Thursday (December 2), the 63-year-old actor sat down with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos to give his first sit-down interview after the fatal shooting on the set of his movie Rust, which left cinematographer Halyna Hutchins dead and director Joel Souza injured.
During the interview, Alec responded to George, 60, recently saying that it’s “insane” for an actor not to check a prop gun to make sure it didn’t contain live rounds.
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In an interview last month, George talked about the Rust shooting, which he compared to the 1993 death of his friend Brandon Lee, who was killed in an accidental shooting while making the movie The Crow.
“I’ve been on sets for 40 years and the person that hands you the gun, the person that is responsible for the gun is either the prop or the armorer, period,” George said on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast.
“Now every single time I’m handed a gun on the set, every time they hand me a gun I look at it, I open it. I show it to the person I’m pointing it to, I show it to the crew. Every single take you had to back to the armorer when you’re done,” George explained. “You do it again and part of it is because of what happened to Brandon, everyone does it. Everybody knows and maybe Alec did that, hopefully he did do that.”
In his interview with ABC News, Alec called out George for making those comments.
“Well, there were a lot of people who felt it necessary to contribute some comment to the situation, which really didn’t help the situation at all,” Alec said when George‘s comments were brought up.
“If your protocol is you’re checking the gun every time, well, good for you. Good for you,” Alec continued. “I’ve probably handled weapons as much as any other actor in films with an average career. Again, shooting or being shot by someone. And in that time, I had a protocol and it never let me down.”
He then went on to describe the procedure he goes through when handling a gun on set. Alec said that the prop professional would take the weapon from him and reset it, if he maneuvered any of its mechanics.
“The prop person said, ‘Don’t do that,’ when I was young. And they’d say, ‘One thing you would need to understand is we don’t want the actor to be the last line of defense against any catastrophic breach of safety with the gun,” Alec explained. “My job is to make sure the gun is safe and then I hand you the gun and I declare the gun is safe. The crew is not relying on you to say that it’s safe. They’re relying on me to say that it’s safe.’”
He added, “When that person who is charged with that job handed me the weapon, I trusted them. And I never had a problem.”
You can find out more about Alec Baldwin said during the interview about the Rust shooting here.
.@GStephanopoulos presses Alec Baldwin on fatal 'Rust' accident: "Why did you choose, in your 40 years [in the industry], not to check the gun yourself?" https://t.co/zYugqKhIVW #BaldwinABC pic.twitter.com/Y9eTITwliE
— ABC News (@ABC) December 3, 2021