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Actor and producer Alec Baldwin is back on social media and defending the on-set conditions of his movie Rust, despite being under investigation for fatally shooting a woman during filming a few weeks ago.
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While filming a scene near Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Western, Baldwin, 63, shot and killed Halyna Hutchins, the film’s director of photography, and injured director Joel Souza. Santa Fe police said last week that Baldwin is cooperating with the investigation, which also involves assistant director Dave Halls and armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed.
Hours before the Oct. 22 shooting, several camera operators walked off the set to protest working conditions, including long hours and commutes, the Los Angeles Times previously reported. Lane Luper, an A-camera first assistant, resigned from the movie crew the day before Hutchins’ death and told producers in a resignation email that the production was playing “fast and loose” with gun safety on the film’s set, NBC News reported Tuesday.
“In my 10 years as a camera assistant, I’ve never worked on a show that cares so little for the safety of its crew,” Luper told producers in the email, according to NBC News.
On Tuesday, Baldwin made seven Instagram posts sharing screenshots of a Facebook comment from costume designer Terese Magpale Davis, who also worked on the movie. “The story being spun of us being overworked and surrounded by unsafe, chaotic conditions is bullshit,” Davis said, saying that “no one was too tired to do their jobs” and that crew were offered hotels but turned them down because “they didn’t feel they were fancy enough.”
Baldwin captioned the comment: “Read this.”
Davis’s tirade, which Baldwin reposted in its entirety, goes on to say the film’s producers “were some of the most approachable and warm producers I’ve ever worked with,” and referred to camera operators who walked off the set prior to the shooting as “not heroes” and “camera jerks.”
Santa Fe district attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies said last week that “no one has been ruled out” in the shooting. In addition to the revolver Baldwin shot Hutchins and Souza with, investigators recovered hundreds of blank, dummy, and live rounds.
On Wednesday, Jason Bowles, an attorney for Guttierez-Reed, told NBC News that he believes someone may have put a live round in a box of dummy ammunition in order to sabotage the film, offering no evidence as Bowles claimed that crew angry about on-set conditions might “want to sabotage the set, want to prove a point, want to say they’re disgruntled, they’re unhappy.”
“There was a box of dummy rounds labeled ‘dummy,’” Bowles told NBC News. “We don’t know whether the live round came from that box. We’re assuming somebody put the live round in that box.”
After the shooting, Baldwin used Twitter and Instagram to express his regret about Hutchins’ death. On Twitter, he retweeted a New York Times article which reported that Halls told a detective that he didn’t inspect each round in each chamber of the gun before handing it to Baldwin and telling him it was safe to use.
Baldwin is also back to posting about politics. On October 30, responding to a tweet from writer Kurt Andersen asking what “once-great American institutions misleadingly operate under their old names,” Baldwin responded: “The federal government.”
And on Tuesday, he commented on the Democrats’ ongoing trouble passing President Joe Biden’s agenda. “[Sen. Joe] Manchin will either primary Biden or switch parties and run as a Republican,” Baldwin tweeted.
He has since locked his Twitter account.
