Alec Baldwin has described the killing of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins as a “horrible thing” that he still finds it hard to talk about, in a video posted to Instagram.
The clip appears to have been recorded in his hotel room after he went out for a curry with Martin Bashir in a small British market town on Monday evening.
The Hollywood star has been in the town of Alton, Hampshire, for several days, where he is working on a new independent low-budget film entitled 97 Minutes.
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It is his first role since the tragedy on the set of Rust, when a gun he was holding discharged, killing Hutchins.
In a video diary installment uploaded to Instagram Monday night, Baldwin pondered the existential absurdity of the work of an actor, saying, “You go to work and you forget what you’re supposed to do. I just was like, ‘What do you do? What is acting, or any of this nonsense that I’ve ended up doing?’”
Baldwin said in the video that it was “strange to go back to work” and that he had hadn’t worked “since 21 October last year, when this horrible thing happened on the set of this film, and we had the accidental death of our cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. I still find that hard to say, but I went back to work today for the first time in three and a half months.”
In a meandering, stream-of-consciousness style reflecting on his first day back on the job, Baldwin said: “Movies are nearly always the same…everyone was young compared to me… everyone is young… I went back to work today, it was interesting. Who knows what the future will bring?”
Baldwin appears to have filmed the clip after an Indian dinner with the disgraced BBC reporter and celebrity interviewer Martin Bashir.
The two men met at Mifta’s Indian restaurant in Alton, Hampshire. Another guest at the restaurant said they were “deeply engrossed” in conversation and appeared relaxed in each other’s company and British newspaper the Daily Mail carried photographs of them leaving the restaurant and heading to Bashir’s car.
The outlet said that Bashir drove Baldwin back to his hotel before heading back to his own home about a half-hour drive away.
Baldwin is thought to have first got to know Bashir when they worked at MSNBC.
They were both fired from the cable channel in the space of a month in 2013: Baldwin for making allegedly homophobic remarks to a photographer and Bashir for a bizarre outburst in which he suggested Sarah Palin should be subjected to an abusive practice meted out by some 18th-century enslavers who forced their captives to eat human waste.
Since then, the careers of both men had flourished—Bashir was hired as religion correspondent by the BBC and Baldwin went on to star in string of hit TV shows and movies—before crashing in spectacular style.
A few months before Baldwin’s Rust tragedy, Bashir was summarily shamed by the BBC over his famous interview with Princess Diana. The Corporation found, in a long-awaited report, that Bashir had, incredibly, forged bank statements that suggested the princess’ brother’s aides were selling information to Britain’s security services and the media. Bashir was found to have sought to capitalize on Diana’s paranoia and isolation, and was condemned by Diana’s sons, William and Harry, for his manipulation of her.
Baldwin, 63, filmed another clip of himself walking down Alton’s main street in recent days.
In that clip, he says: “I’m in this little town. Whenever I come to places like this, whenever I travel away from the U.S., I look at little places like this. I think, ‘What would it be like to live here? What would it be like to be a kid and this is your home?’”
Baldwin has said that he was told the gun he was handed on the set of Rust was not loaded or contained prop ammunition and that he did not pull the trigger. However, it had somehow been loaded with a live round and cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, 42, was tragically killed when it went off.
A police investigation is ongoing.
