Last week, an accidental gun discharge on the set of the Western Rust resulted in the death of one of its crew members. Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed when star Alec Baldwin unwittingly fired a prop gun he didn’t know was loaded. (Its director, Joel Souza, was also wounded.) Since then, one startling revelation after another about what caused the incident has emerged. Throughout, Baldwin has been cooperative with police and investigators. And now he’s talking to reporters.
As per Deadline, the actor and his wife, Hilaria, agreed to speak to a journalist as they drove through Manchester, Vermont, far from the Santa Fe set of Rust.
“A woman died,” Baldwin said. “She was my friend. She was my friend. The day I arrived in Santa Fe to start shooting, I took her to dinner with Joel, the director. We were a very, very well-oiled crew shooting a film together and then this horrible event happened.”
Baldwin couldn’t go into details, saying he was instructed “not to talk about the investigation.” What he could say was that he was “eagerly awaiting for the sheriff’s department’ to release their findings,” and that he “talks to the cops every day.”
Hilaria repeated had to remind her husband not to go into “details,” and when asked about his meeting with Hutchins’ widower, Matthew Hutchins, he simply said he “wouldn’t know how to characterize” their discussion, but did say he was “overwhelmed with grief.”
What Baldwin did say was that what happened was a “one in a trillion” accident. “How many bullets have been fired in films and tv shows in the last 75 years?” he said. “This is America. Probably billions. And nearly all of them without incident.” He did, however, call for new safety measures on film sets.
The conversation only lasted four minutes, and Baldwin said he did it “out of courtesy.”
Among the revelations about what happened on the set of Rust leading up to the tragic shooting was that there had been an air of “complacency” towards safety issues, as well as questions about certain crew members, including its armorer and assistant director.
