No other actor has had a career quite like that of Alec Baldwin, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded in front of an audience at the Boulder International Film Festival last Friday.

The 68-year-old has anchored massive blockbusters (The Hunt for Red October) and acclaimed indies (The Cooler). He has starred in a best picture Oscar winner (The Departed) and a best comedy series Emmy winner (30 Rock). He has hosted Saturday Night Live (more times than anyone else — 17) and the Academy Awards (back in 2010, with Steve Martin). And he has personally picked up, along the way, three Emmys, three Golden Globes and seven Actor Awards for individual performances, as well as Oscar and Tony nominations.

Baldwin has also had a tumultuous time as a public figure. For much of the last 40 years, paparazzi and tabloids have fixated on him, and he has not always conducted himself in a manner that would discourage their interest. Then, on Oct. 21, 2021, on the set of Rust, a low-budget indie that he was starring in and producing in New Mexico, a tragic accident occurred: a gun was handed to him to use in a scene, supposedly having already been checked by an armorer to confirm it was unloaded, but when the gun fired (Baldwin said he didn’t pull the trigger), a live round emerged, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza.

As a result, Baldwin’s last few years have been a rather unpleasant rollercoaster ride, as is chronicled in Oscar nominee Rory Kennedy’s new documentary The Trial of Alec Baldwin. In January 2023, Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter, but in April 2023, that charge was dropped. Then, in January 2024, he was again charged with involuntary manslaughter. But, in July 2024, three days into his trial, all charges against him were dismissed with prejudice after the judge found that authorities had deliberately withheld evidence from his defense team. Baldwin was cleared, but his life would never be the same.

Over the course of this interview in Boulder, Baldwin enthralled an audience of hundreds with colorful anecdotes, vocal impressions and physical comedy bits. He also opened up, perhaps to a greater extent than ever before, about the Rust tragedy, the toll that it has taken on his health and how it has impacted outlook for the future. You can listen to the full conversation via the audio player near the top of this post or any major podcast app, or you can read a few memorable excerpts from it below.

On working with Hollywood studios…

“This is the best way to define movie studios and producers, and I’m going to try to tone this down and not make it too vulgar: They go to your mother’s house and they rape your mother. They attack your mother. They beat her. They rape your mother. They take the whole weekend to rape your mother. It’s a horrible, horrible thing. 18 months later, you run into them at a party or a screening and they go, ‘Hey, man, I’m sorry. I know we raped your mother, but I got a script that is so good for you. It is so good. Let’s do business. Let’s not anything stand in the way of doing business.’”

On his post-The Hunt for Red October decision to do A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway…

“When I did Streetcar, it changed my life. It changed my life in ways I never thought possible. And even though I lost a lot in the process — it really was the beginning of me turning away from playing leading roles in studio films and doing a lot of indies — I wouldn’t change anything because the play was really such an extraordinary experience for me. I loved it.”

On his cameo in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman…

“He gives me a monologue, I memorize the whole thing and I go to his studio in Brooklyn, 40 Acres [and a Mule Filmworks] — he’s got a little floor with some staging, and he shoots stuff there if it’s minimal, if it’s not like a big sweeping thing. So we’re shooting there — he got me there early in the morning, I was tired, I memorized my lines — and he goes, ‘I changed the script. I want you to memorize this.’ And I’m like, ‘Shit.’ They’re putting the makeup on me, I’m half-dead, I’m guzzling coffee, I go out there and I go, ‘I’m going to give you the best I can, but I’m going to have to work toward this. I don’t think I can really get it unless I go off for an hour and try to memorize this. I really don’t.’ He goes, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ So when I do it, I keep flubbing, and I say some very choice words, I’m really angry. I’m sitting there going, ‘Everybody here, I want y’all to remember that — shit, goddamn, shit, fuck shit. I got it. I got it. Y’all got to remember the one time we came down that way when he… God, shit, fuck shit, fuck.’ And he puts that in the movie! My friend says to me, ‘I went to go see BlacKkKlansman.’ I said, ‘How was it?’ He goes, ‘Man, that whole Tourette thing you were doing in the beginning was fantastic. Man, that was so cool. Who gave you that idea? That crazy Tourette shit you were doing, man, you were great.’ I call him [Spike] on the phone and I go, ‘You son of a bitch.’ He wanted the guy to be flubbing and swearing — he’s not a pro — so he put that in the movie. He never told me. So the movie business is tricky.”

On how he wound up impersonating Donald Trump for SNL…

“Lorne calls me up [about doing a pre-2016 election SNL appearance as Trump] and I go, ‘I want to go see this screening of this film out in East Stanford with my friends.’ The great Bruce Weber, the photographer and artist, had made a documentary about Robert Mitchum. And Lorne goes [sarcastically], ‘OK, good for you. Good for you. You don’t want to come in and be part of the hottest comedy sketch of the year? You can go watch your Robert Mitchum documentary.’ So I come in and I do it and he goes to me, ‘It’s only going to be two shows, man. He’s never going to win.’ [Flash forward to] I’m laying in bed with my wife on election night. We don’t have a TV in our room. I got my computer. We’re both asleep. It’s three o’clock. I wake up, [check the result] and I turn to my wife and I go, ‘He won. He won.’ And my wife literally just goes, ‘Ugh.’ She groans. And then I go, ‘I got to do this thing for the next four years! He’s going to ask me to do it for four years!’ So you start watching tapes of him. In acting school, they taught us watch the footage with the sound off. The voice comes last. So I’m watching footage of him and I’m going, ‘Oh, he does a lot of weird gestures and his face is always in a scowl.’”

On the tragedy on the set of Rust, and how it led to him working less and wanting to retire…

“We had this incident, this tragedy, in New Mexico, where Halyna Hutchins was killed on the set of the film, and that was unspeakably difficult to deal with… Because of the situation in New Mexico, which was very painful, I wound up staying home a lot. I was home with my kids for three-and-a-half years — I hardly worked at all — and that’s just changing now. I’m going to go off and do a bunch of things. But I was home and I got used to it, and I don’t want to leave my house anymore. I don’t. I don’t want to work anymore. I don’t. I really don’t. I want to retire and stay home with my kids.”

On the backstory of the new Rory Kennedy-directed documentary The Trial of Alec Baldwin…

“Rory said, ‘You want to do this movie? I want to do this movie about you.’ And I thought, ‘Ah.’ And we shot it — they were around during the trial in New Mexico, and they were around interviewing me, and she was always asking for more time: ‘Can I grab you for 20 minutes here? … We got the lights and the camera.’ There was a lot of that during the trial — before and during — and the movie, I think, exemplifies how it was beyond prosecutorial overreach; it was people who committed a crime. They committed a crime in hiding evidence during my trial and so forth. And it impacted me in every way — financially, career-wise, my wife, my kids, my health. I was so sick. I mean, we had to go back and finish the movie Rust in Montana as a component of the settlement with her husband. We had to finish. We gave him the movie and said, ‘You sell it and do whatever you want with it.’ So I had to go [finish the film], and I was really sick — I had a nerve condition that you get when you take blood pressure medication, orthostatic hypotension, where you black out. I blacked out three times during the St. Patrick’s Day weekend of that year, and fell on top of my wife once. It was crazy. It was horrible. So I get into bed. I’m in bed for eight days. I can’t get out of bed. I can’t walk. I had to go to physical therapy for two weeks. And I had to get up on a horse and go back there to Montana to finish the film, or they were going to sue the shit out of me. So I make it — I get there, and I don’t give the performance I want to give because I’m sick, but I did the best I could. And Rory’s making this movie. Now, the movie came out [it premiered at DOC NYC last November but didn’t screen again until Boulder], and when somebody makes a movie about you, you’re never going to be happy. You’re going to have a lot of notes. I didn’t [give her notes] because it’s not a commission — I don’t tell her what to do, it’s her thing. And I think there’s a lot of good things in the movie. I think she’s a great filmmaker. There’s many things I could say, but I’ll summarize with one thing. A very famous lawyer in New York said to me, ‘Did you ever believe anybody did this to you [intentionally left bullets in the gun that was not supposed to be loaded but shot Hutchins] deliberately? That there was a conspiracy of some kind or anything like that? That someone was behind it?’ And I go, ‘If I have to give an answer to that question, the answer is no, because it’s very far-fetched. It’s very difficult to do. However, there were three or four things that I found very odd that happened in and around the day that she died.’ And this lawyer turned to me and goes, “You know what? It makes me wonder what’s going on here with your case.’ I go, ‘What?’ And she goes, ‘Because after they couldn’t get you, it was over. They never tried to find the other people who were responsible for what happened, who brought the bullets onto the set. You never hear about that. They don’t pursue the case. They don’t do anything.’ They tried to get me, and they didn’t get me, and they cheated and broke the law to get me, and it’s just been tough. Hold on one second. I’m going to do something here. Let me see if I can work this out. Hold on. We’ll do this really quickly. [Baldwin Facetimes his wife, Hilaria, and addresses her in front of the audience.] … I told them if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have survived all of the Rust situation, so thank you.”