On Monday night, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah weighed in on the story rocking the entertainment world: the tragic shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set of the Western film Rust, after the actor Alec Baldwin discharged an unchecked gun at her.
As The Daily Beast’s Cheyenne Roundtree reported, the Rust set was plagued by a number of gun misfires prior to Hutchins’ death, and a number of crew members had walked off the production in protest of the poor working conditions.
“OK, maybe I’m an idiot, but I don’t get this. Why do they need to use real guns to make a fake thing?” asked Noah. “Because Hollywood movies love using the fake version of real things for everything except guns. In Hollywood, they’ve got fake tigers, fake houses, fake diversity and inclusion initiatives, but then when it comes to deadly weapons, suddenly they’re like, ‘Let’s get a real gun and see what happens! You know? Switch things up!’”
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Noah then turned his attention to the 24-year-old armorer on the film, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed—an “inexperienced” armorer on her second film who, as Cheyenne Roundtree further reported for The Daily Beast, had run into problems on her previous film for arming an 11-year-old child actress with an unchecked gun.
On a recent podcast, Gutierrez-Reed opened up about her experience on that previous film The Old Way, starring Nicolas Cage.
“By all means, I’m still learning,” she said. “I think loading blanks was, like, the scariest thing to me because I was like, oh, I don’t know anything about it.”
“OK, that is not something you ever want to hear from a person in charge of your guns,” said Noah. “I mean, this gun misfired multiple times and still was allowed on set? How is that possible?”
“Look, man: If you don’t have the budget to pay for gun safety for your gun movie, then maybe you shouldn’t be making a gun movie,” he continued. “Because it is absolutely unnecessary for anybody to lose their life for a pretend thing.”
