Alec Baldwin: The Accidental Actor

Q: Were you actively seeking a wife?

A: No. I wasn't anxious to get married. But I was fascinated by the idea of who I would marry. I know I'll never get married again.

Q: How can you say that?

A: Because I know I'll never get out of this marriage. Never. If my wife and I didn't split up by now with the shit we've been through... [Laughs]

Q: How much time do you spend with Kim?

A: A lot. Five times more than anybody that I've ever known before.

Q: Do you get hassled much in public together?

A: I had a guy come up to us at a sushi restaurant recently, sat down at our table and said, "Hey you guys." I thought: problem. I'm very protective of my wife and the first thing I thought of was how far away is this guy's face from my right hand? I felt myself sit back and torque my body so that I could rotate and send my fist right into his face. For a moment my wife was really uptight--the guy was drank and had an eerie glow to him. He finally was asked to leave and he left. But what do you do? I tend to overdo it at times. Years ago, I was in New York and my girlfriend at the time was bent over on First Avenue tying her shoes and a man bumped into her and her head cracked into the corner of a building. I was in a bad mood and grabbed this guy and spun him around. He was a gnarly-looking older guy, maybe 50, and he had an accent. He said, "Vat, vat? I do nothing!" Then I saw him put his hand in his coat and I punched him in the face as hard as I could. His feet went out from under him and he landed on his back. Then two Tony Danza-type Italian guys came flying out of this garage and they wanted to kill me: "What are ya doin' punchin' him? He's an old man. You like if we fuckin' punch you, hah?" They were all over me and I thought, here we go. Everybody's looking for a place to put that energy, everybody's got a lot of anger.

Q: Do you carry a gun?

A: Kim asked me if I wanted to buy a gun. I said no, because if you buy a gun you have to be ready to use it. But after the L.A. riots I thought about getting a gun. I'm married, I've got to protect my wife--what do you do? So I was talking to these prop guys as I held this pistol. One said, "Yeah, that's a good gun." The second guy said, "Yeah, but that's not your house gun, this here's a small caliber, it's not a stopping gun. You don't want a clip gun that can get jammed, you want a Colt." The third guy said, "That's not your house gun, a shotgun's your house gun. That way you don't have to be a good shot, you just aim in a direction and you'll get a piece of him." I went home and said to Kim, "A shotgun is your house gun." Like it's all my wisdom now. Kim's going, "Aha, I see, all right darlin'."

Q: Can you usually recognize who will be a problem?

A: Your ordinary people are generous. The people who are not forthcoming with my wife, who are not polite or positive, tend to be the wives of directors. People in the business.

Q: How do people respond to you?

A: I get a very respectful and low-key reaction. I'm not Tom Cruise where they're lining up outside my hotel room picketing. And I've crossed the line age-wise, too. I'm not a young leading man featured in Tiger Beat magazine. More than I care to, I have young, attractive girls, not women, batting their eyes and saying, "Hi, how are you? Could you give my phone number to your brother Billy?"

Q: Are there any talented people out there today who you would like to work with?

A: Oh yeah. I'll tell you somebody who I always wished I could work with, because she's the most missed performer in the film business today: Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda is beautiful, she was funny, she was extraordinarily sympathetic, she was powerful, she could act, she had an intellectual credential that could make you believe her in roles a lot of actors can't play, like a psychiatrist. She had it all. A lot of actresses today, they're so serious, you can see their veins popping in their forehead they want that Oscar so bad. They're white-knuckling every frame on film. Where's the next Jane Fonda? Somebody having a good time who's sexy and funny and alive.

Q: Besides Patriot Games, Harrison Ford replaced you in The Fugitive. What did you think of that film?

A: It wasn't at all the kind of movie I would have made. I can see now where that's why they didn't want to make the movie with me. Walter Hill was going to direct the movie, and we sat down with people from Warner Bros, and Walter started talking about Dostoevsky and the mytho-poetic iconoclasm of the character Kimble and the guys from Warner Bros. blinked a couple of times and their eyes glazed over and it was like, Get these people out of here.

Q: Ford's films are big box office. Does it irk you at all when you see films he's in which you wanted?

A: He's a brand name.

Q: Do you know him?

A: No.

Q: Would you want to know him?

A: No. But that's nothing personal. I have no desire to know most actors.

Q: Part of that must be the frustration an actor like yourself must feel when competing for certain parts. You've been up for some big ones, haven't you?

A: I went to audition for GoodFellas. I went to Scorsese's apartment in midtown. If he told me to jump out the window I would have done it to get the part. I was aching. But it was like I was in a blackout. What the fuck am I doing there? What am I supposed to say? Am I supposed to say something now to make you do something for me? WHAT IS THAT? HOW CAN I FIND OUT? I wanted to rip the plaster off his walls to find the fortune-cookie-size piece of paper that has the answer for what I'm supposed to say to make this man give me this job. I'll drill through the walls with my fingernails, my teeth. But there is no answer. The hour goes by and Scorsese says, "Okay, thank you very much." I leave and I don't get the job. Ray Liotta got it and he was great in it, nobody could have done it better. There are so many movies I've wanted to do, that I've begged to do. I wanted to do The Godfather, Part III, everybody knows that. One of the most paralyzing moments of my life was getting the FedEx'd script. I went numb. I took the script with me to Central Park and when I opened it I started to hear the music. It could have been an episode of "Laverne and Shirley" and I would have gone, "Hey man, I'm in." I remember one real black-belt-genius studio executive was offering me one more bogus romantic comedy after another and I kept trying to explain why I didn't want to do them. I'll never forget this moment. I'm having lunch with this guy and he looks at me and goes, "Aha. Aha. I get it. I see what you want now. You want the good stuff."

Q: How are things now for you as far as getting the "good stuff?

A: Tough. I would have loved to have done Lestat in Interview With the Vampire. I would love to be in an absurd costume drama like that, that's ripe for visual imagery. To be in this business and have tremendous integrity and only make distinguished choices is very tough. Denzel Washington's career is an enormous luxury. Compare him to Wesley Snipes. Do you think that they set out for it to be that way? All actors set out for the same thing: to make both entertaining films and important films.

Q: When you decided to become an actor, what misconceptions did you have about the business?

A: I didn't think that it ate its young the way it does. I thought it was more in the interest of the powers-that-be to cultivate and bring along people that they had faith in. But it's very adversarial. People are driven by fear. One wrong decision can ruin your life or derail you for a significant time. There's a lot of money at stake. Paul Newman is a friend and I asked him how the business has changed and he said, "Failure is much more expensive now than it was."

Q: Writer Richard Corliss wrote in Time: "Hollywood doesn't quite know what to do with Alec Baldwin. He keeps disappearing into his roles."

A: I'm not convinced of this, but I'm beginning to think that that's a hindrance to a successful career in films at this time. The times demand people other people can identify with and be comfortable with.

Q: How lonely is acting?

A: It's lonely. You have to have other people there. Acting demands these peculiar forums to have something special. The curse of the actor is that you're always boring everybody around you because you're trying to make them into an audience.

Q: Are you a complex person?

A: On the simplest level.

Q: Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

A: I'm very optimistic about everything when I'm away from the movies [laughs].

Q: How'd you survive the earthquake?

A: A lot of things broke. I wasn't scared but I was upset days later. I never had such a profound delayed reaction to something. The inevitability of it. It let a lot of people know there is a God. Los Angeles is a fairly godless place.

Q: What's the most embarrassing thing that's happened to you?

A: When I was a kid, we always had secondhand cars and in the winter time we'd have to push-start my father's car. It was like a scene from a John Hughes movie where all the dads would be in their suits and get in their new cars and drive out of their driveways and here I was pushing my father's car down the street.

Q: Weren't you in a serious car accident in 1983?

A: An old lady in a big Cadillac made an illegal left turn right in front of my Karmann Ghia Volkswagen in a rainstorm. My car was crushed into an accordion and I hurt my neck and my back. Her car didn't have a scratch on it. Which changed my mind about transportation in L.A. forever. I will never have a convertible and I will never have a small car again.

Q: Last question: You've complained about studio executives being petrified to make any decisions. If you were in their shoes would you know what to do?

A: I don't have a fucking clue. I've got to get up in the morning and get through the day. I don't have any answers. I've got to go with my instincts. I'm another animal in the jungle, man. And in the background in my head I hear OOOOO aaaaa whaaaa--all day long I hear those jungle sounds. I'm trying to figure it out.

______________

Lawrence Grobel interviewed Kim Basinger for the Jan./Feb. Movieline.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5