Alec and Hilaria Against the World

Alec and Hilaria Against the World,A year and a half after the death of Halyna Hutchins, Alec Baldwin is back on set to finish “Rust.” Since the fatal shooting, the Baldwins marriage has taken on a starring role.

Alec and Hilaria Against the World

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Late in the day on October 21, 2021, Alec Baldwin was sitting alone in an interrogation room at the Santa Fe County sheriff’s office, trying to get ahold of his wife, Hilaria. “Can you hear me?” Alec asked quietly. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”

Baldwin had just come from the set of Rust, the low-budget western in which he was playing a moody patriarch dealing with the aftermath of an accidental killing. At the sheriff’s office, he was wearing the bushy white beard he grew for the part and a navy-blue T-shirt and dark jeans, having changed out of his costume, which was covered in fake blood and now considered evidence in a criminal investigation. Just a few hours earlier, Baldwin had shot Joel Souza, the film’s director, and Halyna Hutchins, its cinematographer, with a Colt .45 that wasn’t supposed to be loaded. Souza and Hutchins were in the hospital, and Baldwin didn’t yet know that Hutchins had just been pronounced dead.

Baldwin called his wife again. “How is everyone at home?” he asked after getting through. “How are the kids?”

“The kids are great, the kids are great,” Hilaria said before Alec cut her off.

“Hold on a second, please,” Alec said. He asked if Hilaria had told their eldest child what happened. She hadn’t. Hilaria and their kids had been planning to join Alec in New Mexico. Their 8-year-old daughter was even scheduled to film a small role. Now, Alec was going to have to stay in Santa Fe to talk to the lawyers and investigators who were just beginning to sort out this nightmare. “Are you convinced you don’t want to come tomorrow?” he asked his wife.

“I don’t think it’s a great idea,” Hilaria said.

“Let me just say this to you, just to be clear,” Alec said. Over the years, Baldwin had found himself in the middle of controversies big and small — paparazzi run-ins, a nasty voice-mail, MAGA hatred, his wife’s accent. But this was a genuine tragedy: He had shot a woman standing just a few feet in front of him. Baldwin is rarely at a loss for words, yet he found it all but impossible to explain the horror of the situation, even to the person who had become his closest confidante. “This is really — I mean …” Alec said.

“I’m so sorry,” Hilaria said. “You must be so traumati — ”

“No, no,” Alec said, taking the phone off speaker and bringing it to his ear. “What I am is someone who — I don’t want to do this for a living anymore. I don’t.” He seemed to be speaking with sudden clarity: “I don’t want to be a public person.”

A year and a half after the shooting, Baldwin is still grappling with the fact that along with everything else he has accomplished in his life and career, he is also now and forever someone who accidentally shot and killed a woman. (Souza, the director, survived.) Last month, he returned to the set of Rust, this time in Montana, where he is still trying to finish a movie that pretty much everyone involved would prefer to forget. If things had gone to plan — if a woman had not died — Rust would have already launched quietly into video-on-demand obscurity. Instead, Baldwin had been charged with involuntary manslaughter, and the film had become the linchpin of a legal settlement with Hutchins’s husband, who is now an executive producer on it. The macabre hope is that enough people will want to see the movie that led to Baldwin killing someone that the proceeds can go into a trust fund for Hutchins’s 10-year-old son.

Throughout this ordeal, Baldwin has said that Hilaria “took control of my life” and that he could not have survived the past 18 months without her. Even before the Rust shooting, Alec, Hilaria, and their Baldwinitos — as they refer to their seven children, all of whom are under the age of 10 — were becoming as well known for their homelife as they were for Alec’s career. While the Baldwins declined to participate in this story, they have always lived their lives in the open and have shared their experience of the past 18 months on Instagram and elsewhere. There is no right way to get through a tragedy. The Baldwins seem to have decided, for better and worse, to try posting through it. The day after Alec arrived in Montana, he got some good news: The criminal charges against him were being dropped. He quickly opened Instagram to post a blurry photo of Hilaria from the early days of their relationship. “I owe everything I have to this woman,” Alec wrote, before offering parenthetical thanks to his attorney. Later that day, Hilaria posted a photo of herself curled up in Alec’s lap, the Baldwins made into a modern-day Pietà.

Hilaria packed up the kids and left Greenwich Village the day after the shooting with no destination in mind other than somewhere away from the photographers and reporters descending on their apartment building. She eventually landed on Manchester, a small town in southwestern Vermont, where her family happened to have roots pre-dating the American Revolution. Alec joined them, and the Baldwins had a few days of quiet before the paparazzi found them and started documenting their every move: picking up pizza, buying clothes at a Ralph Lauren outlet, looking for the family cat in the backyard of their rental home. After several days of being chased around by half a dozen photographers, the Baldwins pulled over on a country road to give an interview in the hope that doing so would make them go away. Alec did most of the talking, but Hilaria filmed the interaction on her phone and jumped in at several points. “Just do me a favor,” Alec said. “My kids are in the car crying.”

“Because you guys are following them, and they know,” Hilaria said.

“As a courtesy to you, I came to talk to you,” Alec said. “Now, please, would you just not follow us?”

“Go home,” Hilaria said. “Go home!”

As the dust settled, Baldwin read a 2017 New Yorker article titled “The Sorrow and the Shame of the Accidental Killer.” In the story, the writer, Alice Gregory, looks at the lives of people who had unwittingly killed another person: An elderly man hits the gas instead of the brakes; a baby is momentarily neglected; a gun goes off unexpectedly. The article didn’t offer Baldwin much hope. The killers in Gregory’s story struggled to get back to work, lost touch with friends, and dealt with public scorn and recrimination. They experienced nightmares and hallucinations. (“There was this voice: ‘You don’t deserve to feel happy. Look what happened last time you felt happy.’”) Many of them were possessed by a persistent need to rewind every detail of what happened, agonizing over tiny ways the tragedy might have been avoided and trying to figure out how they could make amends. One woman, blinded by the sun while driving just before she hit a man on a motorcycle, sent a letter to her state’s attorney asking to be locked away.

Baldwin felt much of this. “I shot this woman with a gun today,” he said during his initial interrogation in Santa Fe. “If you don’t think I feel really, really shitty about that, I do.” When the detectives told him Hutchins had died, Baldwin yelled “No!,” then sat in silence for more than a minute before staggering out of the room to call Hilaria again. He obsessed about ways Hutchins’s death might have been avoided, waking up at all hours of the night to vivid nightmares in which guns were often going off. Multiple members of the Rust crew, as well as Hutchins’s family, filed lawsuits against Baldwin and the film’s other producers. Donald Trump Jr. started selling T-shirts: GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE. ALEC BALDWIN KILLS PEOPLE.

Many accidental killers choose to retreat from public view, including Michael Massee, the only other person to accidentally kill someone with a gun on a contemporary movie set. In 1993, Massee shot and killed Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee’s son, while making The Crow; a projectile was unknowingly lodged in the barrel of his gun. Afterward, Massee took a year off from acting and didn’t talk publicly about the shooting for more than a decade. “I don’t think you ever get over something like that,” he said in 2005. “It took me the time it took to be able to — not so much put it in perspective but to be able to move on.”

Sitting in silence isn’t the Baldwins’ preferred mode. In the weeks after the shooting, Alec was back online, posting screenshots of a Rust crew member insisting the set had been safe and tweeting that productions hire a police officer to handle guns on set. (“Dumb,” David Simon, who created The Wire, replied.) Hilaria resumed posting too. The Baldwins were still in Vermont on Halloween, ten days after the shooting, when she shared a photo of the Baldwinitos in costume with Alec as one of Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things. “Parenting through this has been an intense experience, to say the least,” she wrote.

In his 2017 memoir, Nevertheless, Baldwin cites his “tendency to want to fix everything, and my belief that I can,” as a quality that has sometimes gotten him into trouble. He called and texted constantly with detectives in Santa Fe, sometimes while one or more of his kids were screaming in the background, to relay his theories about the case or complain about the vitriol being tossed his way. He hired private investigators to look into what happened, including the possibility that it was all a setup — that someone had planted bullets on set hoping to disrupt the production, perhaps as political retribution for Baldwin’s Trump impersonation or as a tragically misguided attempt to highlight safety issues on the low-budget set. Baldwin knew it wasn’t likely, but he had always been attracted to conspiracy theories. (He admits to a “lifelong obsession” with John F. Kennedy’s assassination.) A few weeks after the shooting, he went so far as to text Hutchins’s widower, Matthew, to alert him to the prospect. “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,” Baldwin wrote. “The more information that is presented to me about certain anomalies on that day, the more open-minded I become.” (Baldwin has since said he believes it was an accident, and the prosecutor’s office has said it found no evidence of sabotage.)

Six weeks after the shooting, Baldwin decided to sit down for a prime-time interview on ABC. Many people around him, including Hilaria, weren’t sure that this was a good idea — that there was no way he could defend himself without coming across as defensive. In the interview, Baldwin told George Stephanopoulos that he didn’t want to “sound like I’m the victim” and made sure to emphasize the central tragedy of Hutchins’s death. But he also seemed to see the incident as something that had happened to him. He said he and Hutchins shared “something profound in common” in that they both believed the gun wasn’t loaded. Baldwin highlighted the fact that he pointed the gun at her only because they were lining up a shot and she was telling him to do so. He claimed he didn’t even pull the trigger. Toward the end of the interview, Stephanopoulos said that while it was clear Baldwin was sad and angry, he wondered whether he felt any guilt. Baldwin said he did not. “I feel that someone is responsible for what happened, and I can’t say who that is,” Baldwin said. “But I know it’s not me.”

Warren Beatty once told Baldwin that the source of many of Baldwin’s problems was a common one among actors: When they step in front of a camera, they feel the need to make it into a moment. There was no question that his tears were genuine. But the very fact that he was appearing on television, where he had performed so many times, seemed in conflict with the somber reflection, not to mention the sound legal advice, the situation called for. Hilaria defended her husband on Instagram — “We are messy, unfiltered, and wear our hearts, naked, on our sleeves” — but the public sympathy for Baldwin seemed to shift following the interview. After Matthew Hutchins had filed a lawsuit against Baldwin and the film’s other producers, he went on the Today show to express how hurtful the interview had been. “Watching him, I just felt so angry,” Hutchins said. “The idea that the person holding the gun, causing it to discharge, is not responsible is absurd to me. Hearing him blame Halyna in the interview, and shift responsibility to others, and seeing him cry about it — I just feel like, Are we really supposed to feel bad about you, Mr. Baldwin?”

Alec Baldwin on the set of Rust last month.Photo: Splash/Backgrid/SplashNews.com

On Instagram, Alec loves to post eulogies to people he admires: Anne Heche, Colin Powell (“Should have been the first Black president”), James Caan, Bob Dole. In March, he posted one for the actor Robert Blake. In 2001, Blake’s wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, was shot in the head while sitting in Blake’s car outside a restaurant. He was tried for murder but ultimately acquitted. He never acted again. “I realize that many people have had harsh feelings toward him,” Baldwin wrote. “Today, I want to remember him as the incredibly gifted actor he was.”

With the worst moment of his life receding into his past, Baldwin is figuring out how to ensure that accidentally killing a woman isn’t in the lede of his obituary, as it was for The Crow’s Massee. The immediate concern is finishing Rust, which he hopes to do this month. Baldwin has regrown the beard and put on a new set of western clothes — the originals are still in evidence — to make a movie that is now being filmed in front of a pack of paparazzi snapping shots of Baldwin getting dragged up to a gallows for an onscreen hanging. Then there will be the long wait for the film’s release, which will resurface painful memories and bring a fresh round of scrutiny. Baldwin is also working with a documentary crew led by director Rory Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter, a member of another big Catholic family intimately familiar with tragedy and turmoil and that Baldwin has always admired.

Baldwin has said over the past year that he doesn’t care about anything beyond his family. Alec and Hilaria tried hosting a podcast together after Hilaria’s accent scandal, but the show, What’s One More?, stopped publishing new episodes after the Rust shooting. Last year, Hilaria tried again with Witches Anonymous, which Alec promoted on Instagram — “From one I admire deeply and whose sage advice has kept me alive” — but that show ended after just ten episodes. Since Rust, Hilaria has returned to posting as she had before — doing a headstand at eight-months pregnant—while waging a campaign to break down the many pisions she sees in our society. “The vaxers and anti-v, the dems and repubs, the Sox and the Yankees … the celebs and paps,” she wrote in a post about a member of the paparazzi she had befriended. “We just have to put away our prejudices.” For her 39th birthday, earlier this year, Alec posted a series of videos with a request: “Follow my wife on Instagram, please?” She was just shy of a million followers, and as a gift, he wanted to help her get over the top.

Going forward, there is always the possibility that Spielberg will call or that Lorne Michaels will have Baldwin back for an 18th go-round on SNL, but there are only so many choice roles available to him anymore. His family has become his work, and much of his career in prestige movies has recently turned toward cameos — in A Star Is Born, as the host of Lady Gaga’s appearance on SNL, and in Tár, interviewing the film’s main character for his podcast — all of which suggests the next phase of Baldwin’s life may largely involve simply playing himself. “I had a great retirement plan,” he said last year when he appeared on a podcast hosted by his friend Chris Cuomo, who lost his job at CNN a few weeks after the Rust shooting. “I thought I could slow down and do a little Off Broadway theater here and there, do a little part in a film — see the world! Even now, I turn to my wife and I’ll whisper to her, ‘You realize where I’m supposed to be right now, don’t you?’ And by that, I mean, like, David Geffen’s yacht in Nice.” Instead, he was managing school drop-offs and had recently gone to Italy, not for vacation but to film a pair of family Christmas comedies with his brother Billy. “Why do I put my head down and keep going?” Baldwin said. “What choice do I have?”

“Sleep in separate rooms!” Cuomo said. “That’s a choice.”

It took Baldwin a moment to get the joke. “Oh, you mean that — oh God, oh God,” Baldwin replied.

“You’re certainly securing a legacy,” Cuomo said. “But you better keep working.”

“I told people I’m going to be a greeter in Vegas … ‘Remember me? I was in Beetlejuice! How are you, everybody? Please, table No. 9, Frank,’” Baldwin said. “I’m gonna be a greeter in Vegas any day now.”

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the May 8, 2023, issue of New York Magazine.

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