Baldwin may not have a bounty on his head, but he has long felt under siege from his more contemporary tormentors — the tabloid media and political conservatives — and it has never been easy for him to let things go. His “Rust” journey has been a protracted, higher-stakes form of a familiar Baldwin ritual: He does or says something controversial; then, in an attempt to be understood, he doubles down on whatever he said or did, inviting further scrutiny; finally, feeling victimized and aggrieved, he vows to stop engaging with the media. By the time I started working on this article in early April, Baldwin’s lawyers had persuaded him to stop talking to reporters about “Rust.” This account is based on more than 30 other interviews conducted in New York and Santa Fe, in addition to public court filings, police records and videos, as well as documents obtained under New Mexico’s freedom-of-information act.
In 2019, when he first started working with Souza on “Rust,” Baldwin was married to a yoga instructor and social media influencer, Hilaria. They already had four young children, with three still to come. Now in his 60s, he was reproducing the sort of large Irish Catholic family he had grown up in on Long Island. He was no longer the in-demand box-office draw that he’d once been, and shooting movies was hard on his young and growing family. But “Rust” spoke to him. It was a small independent film with a modest $7.4 million budget, and the plan was to shoot it in just four weeks. He agreed to play the lead and also signed on as a producer, attaching his production company, El Dorado Pictures, to the project. He was to be paid $250,000 for his combined role, plus a percentage of the profits once the movie was sold to a distributor and eventually released. Out of his earnings, he told investigators, he had carved out $50,000 to augment the pay for the actress playing the most prominent female character, who was budgeted to make just $2,100 for a week of work. They had shot close to half of the film when tragedy struck.
Nearly 30 years before “Rust,” an eerily similar incident unfolded on the North Carolina set of “The Crow,” killing Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon. No criminal charges were filed, and the actor who pulled the trigger, Michael Massee, was treated by the media as a victim himself. But these are very different times. And this was Alec Baldwin. The paparazzi swarmed, and Baldwin’s political enemies pounced. Trump suggested in a talk-radio interview that the shooting of Hutchins might not have been an accident: “In my opinion, he had something to do with it.” Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, was selling T-shirts on his website: “Guns don’t kill people. Alec Baldwin kills people.”
Live rounds are generally prohibited on movie sets, and Baldwin was consumed by the question of how they got onto the set of “Rust.” The armorer’s lawyer suggested on “Good Morning America” that it could have been sabotage. Baldwin later texted Hutchins’s widower about the possibility. “Important for you to keep in mind: The Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office may lack both the skill and the will to properly investigate the sabotage angle,” he wrote. “I’m told their agenda is to write it off as an accident and throw it to the civil courts.”