Alec Baldwin said George Clooney's comments about gun safety after the fatal 'Rust' shooting 'didn't help'
- Baldwin said Clooney's comments — when he said he makes sure a gun isn't loaded on set — "didn't help."
- "If your protocol is you check the gun every time, well, good for you," Baldwin added.
Alec Baldwin takes issue with people like George Clooney who have said since the fatal "Rust" shooting that he should have checked to make sure the gun was empty before using it.
"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," Baldwin told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos in his first sit-down interview on Thursday.
On October 21, a gun held by Baldwin discharged while he was rehearsing a scene of the Western "Rust," killing the movie's cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring the film's director Joel Souza.
"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," he told Maron on the November 15 episode. "I show it to the person I'm pointing it to, I show it to the crew. Every single take, you hand it back to the armorer when you're done."
"You do it again and part of it is because of what happened to Brandon, everyone does it," he continued, referring to his friend Brandon Lee, who died of an accidental shooting while making the 1993 movie "The Crow." "Everybody knows and maybe Alec did that, hopefully, he did do that."
"If your protocol is you check the gun every time, well, good for you," he told Stephanopoulos Thursday. "I had a protocol and it never let me down."
Baldwin said he was told never to check a gun on set because it would force the prop master or armorer to have to reset it.
"The prop person said, 'Don't do that,' when I was young," Baldwin said. "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. 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," he continued. "They're relying on me to say that it's safe.'"
After the deadly incident, Baldwin told Stephanopoulos that he doesn't know if he'll act again, saying: "My family is all I have. Honest to God, I couldn't give a shit about my career anymore."
But if he does, he said he won't be near a gun.
"I can't imagine I would ever do a movie that had a gun in it again. I can't," Baldwin said.