Alec Baldwin Says America Wanted Him ‘to Die’ After ‘Rust’ Shooting

Alec Baldwin this week addressed intense hatred directed at him in the wake of a fatal shooting on the set of the film Rust, saying people wanted him canceled, jailed, or dead.

Speaking on David Duchovny’s “Fail Better” podcast, Baldwin also said he thinks “there’s more to come” about the saga which has overshadowed his life for the last three years. The actor had faced the prospect of prison time over the accidental killing of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins until his involuntary manslaughter case was ultimately dismissed in July after a judge found prosecutors had improperly withheld potential evidence from Baldwin’s defense team.

His case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning he can’t be tried again for the shooting. Baldwin denied pulling the trigger on the prop gun which discharged on the set. The weapon fired a live round which killed Hutchins and injured the Western’s director, Joel Souza. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armorer who loaded the live round into the revolver on the set, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

“The more to come is now my effort, and it’s going to be undeniably a successful effort, to raise and to expose what really happened,” Baldwin said on Duchovny’s podcast. “I was counterpunching. I was on the defensive. I was being accused. I was being indicted.”

The 66-year-old also claimed the mainstream and tabloid press “suppressed every story that could benefit me and amplified every story that could hurt me” in the three years since the fatal accident. “The truth of what happened has never been told. Never,” Baldwin said. “We have more s--t that’s going to come out in ensuing legal filings and so forth.”

“These last three years, people have just dined out,” he continued. “Because in this country, when people hate you on that level, they want three things. They want you to die.” The second thing, he said, was for people to want their enemies to go to prison—“because prison is like a living hell.”

“The third thing is they want you canceled, which is like being in prison or being dead, because you roam the earth and you’re invisible,” Baldwin said. “I do believe that, by the communications I’ve had lately, things are coming back my way to work, and I’m happy for that because I’ve got seven kids. But I’ve also enjoyed the fact that there’s so much of this case that is not known because we didn’t have a full trial.”

He also said that he was grateful for the judge dismissing his case but said it would have been a “little bit better” if a full trial had gone ahead and he’d been found not guilty by a jury. “I’m going to take a break,” Baldwin added. “I don’t want to talk about this for a while. I want to kind of, you know, take a nap.”