A conversation with Alec Baldwin feels rather like being in a holding pattern above New York. Not that it’s boring: on the contrary, talking with this old-fashioned film star and modern-day sitcom god, this part-time Trump antagonist and full-time schmoozy showbiz personality, is an entirely pleasant experience. You are in business class, perhaps even first, and you are happy and sated and stimulated. Spread out invitingly below you are the twinkling lights of Manhattan, where the 61-year-old actor and his 35-year-old wife, Hilaria, own a penthouse apartment. (They also have an 18th-century farmhouse in the Hamptons.) And yet a question presents itself, not unreasonably, as the plane circles the city and each new circumnavigation seems to bring it no closer to terra firma: are we ever going to land?
It is something to do with the circuitous nature of Baldwin’s sentences, the way he riffs and waffles and meanders at will. Nothing can interrupt him, apart from his pets. (“Hold on a second,” he says down the line from New York, and then I hear the words “Girls! Come!” before he returns to the phone to tell me he was “just summoning my dogs”.) It is his appearance in the new docudrama Framing John DeLorean that has occasioned our conversation today. In bite-sized dramatic reconstructions peppered among interviews with the subject’s family and colleagues, Baldwin plays the late automobile executive and inventor, whose gull-winged car was turned into a time machine in Back to the Future but whose life was destroyed by ambition, stupidity and greed. It’s a compelling story that starts with DeLorean relinquishing his position as group executive at General Motors to start his own company and ends with his naive involvement in a cocaine-smuggling operation exposed in an FBI sting.
Baldwin has said he feels differently about DeLorean every day, so I ask where his head is at right now. “With John – I don’t think I’ve ever said this before – and I’m not just saying this to, um, delight you and freshen up this material for this interview – but lately when I think about him – and I’ve been talking about him a lot – I have friends and acquaintances who’ve seen the film, and we go out to dinner and discuss it – I find that beyond anyone who’s – oh, I don’t know – committed murder or they’re a sex trafficker – I kind of look at John as a victim.”
I am trying to fathom the “sex trafficker” comment but he has already moved on. “Now, granted, this sounds like I’m being overly colourful. But he’s a victim of his own ambition. He’s an American businessman and that comes with a whole menu of options. American businesses have changed the world – they’ve fostered innovation on a level that’s unseen – and they’re also responsible for a lot of the horrific pollution and climate change and plastics pollution – I mean, I don’t want to go on and on with that list – and DeLorean is someone who made a lot of poor choices. His family, reputation, his own health, all fell victim to that soaring ambition.”
Baldwin himself had one interaction with the real DeLorean: a late-night phone call in 2004 in which the fallen automobile giant suggested that the actor might like to play him in a movie. “No one was approaching me from a network or a studio. It was all hypothetical. John’s hand was in this because he was an uber control freak. I never heard from him again, and then he died the following year.”
For the film’s reconstructions, Baldwin wears facial prosthetics, a silver wig and a pair of thick black slabs for eyebrows. I bring up the subject of makeup but all this does is prompt one of those ruminations, which ends, with Baldwinian inevitability, in him comparing his treatment unfavourably with that of a more successful actor. “I wish we could have gone further,” he sighs. “The hair and makeup people said they could do a detailed version that would take three hours to apply. The director said: ‘Give us the best you can in two hours.’ I was looking at some stills of Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice – I admire Bale so much – and when you have as much skill as Bale, and they get it just-so …” He trails off, then picks up the thought again with a note of faintly smouldering resentment. “Well, I’m sure they didn’t rush him out of the makeup chair.”
DeLorean once said that no man without a strong sex drive ever accomplished anything, so I ask Baldwin whether he agrees. “What an English question,” he says, with a booming laugh. “What a naughty, naughty English question that is. You could fold the sex into anything, couldn’t you? You could fold the sex into dentistry. Listen, I’m not an authority on that subject, but there are men and women who want what they want, and that is a shotgun for them: they want art, they want palaces, they want people, they collect people, they collect children and wives. They have a reality that burns out and then they dust themselves off and start all over again. And then there are people who are laser-like. There’s one thing they want and that’s all they want, whether it’s money or sex or power. And that was John.”
There is no mystery about which category Baldwin falls into. After the wreckage of his divorce from the actor Kim Basinger in the early 2000s, and the catastrophic fallout when an enraged voicemail he had left for their then-11-year-old daughter found its way online (in the recording, he branded her a “rude, thoughtless little pig”), he went through a period of what he has called “staring off a cliff”. And then he did indeed start all over again with Hilaria, with whom he now has four children under the age of 10.
His career has always seemed so diffuse. Who knows what he ever wanted? He has been a theatre actor, a film and TV star, hosted a quiz show and presided over his own chatshows, as well as Alec Baldwin’s Love Ride, in which he dispenses relationship advice to couples from the back of a limousine (“It’s the silliest thing you’ve ever seen”). There is also a podcast, Here’s the Thing, with a slate of guests including everyone from Itzhak Perlman to Sarah Jessica Parker, Bernie Sanders to Ben and Jerry. If he never gives another great performance again it won’t matter: he is having a blast playing Alec Baldwin, a role that, as a younger man, he appeared often to despise.
Following a stint in soap opera in the early 1980s, he briefly became an actor to be reckoned with, performing David Mamet, Joe Orton and Caryl Churchill on stage, and working with Tim Burton, Jonathan Demme and Mike Nichols in the early years of his film career. But the Basinger era, and his own consuming anger, came to define him in the public consciousness far more than any of his performances, with the exception perhaps of the shark-like sales executive who dominates the opening scene of the 1992 film of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. Then again, that movie wasn’t playing on a loop on the front pages of every tabloid at America’s supermarket checkouts, the way his divorce later did.
Likewise, Baldwin’s onscreen achievements – his Oscar nomination for playing an unscrupulous casino boss in The Cooler or his collaborations with Martin Scorsese (The Aviator, The Departed) and Woody Allen (three films including Blue Jasmine) – have usually been eclipsed by his intemperate comments and displays of aggression. Most actors of his stature and experience make the headlines for winning awards; losing his temper is more Baldwin’s thing. Only this year he pleaded guilty to harassment and agreed to take an anger management course after an argument over a Manhattan parking space. He has also been arrested for disorderly conduct, had a chatshow cancelled after he used a homophobic slur against a paparazzo, and been kicked off a flight for refusing to stop using his phone prior to takeoff.
If he is known for poor control of his impulses, he still has principles. He distinguished himself by refusing to join other former Woody Allen cast members (among them Colin Firth, Timothée Chalamet and Greta Gerwig) in denouncing the legally exonerated film-maker. “There’s a very small number of people who know what really happened in that situation,” Baldwin tells me. “Only the people who were in that room can know for sure, but you have testimony for and against Woody from the same pool of people. One daughter is saying he’s a sex offender; his other son has defended him. I have nothing but the most profound sympathy for anyone who was the victim of sex abuse, but I also have a bit of a conscience, if you will, about people who are falsely accused. That’s tragic, too.”
When I ask how he feels about his friend, the film-maker James Toback, who has been accused of sexual assault or sexual harassment by 395 women, we are firmly back in the holding pattern again. “The only thing I have to say about that – like any of the other cases – is that there are people who have admirably brought that subject to the fore – whether it’s Asia Argento or Rose McGowan, to name two of the most notable – and that moment seems to be slipping away. I hope we can rekindle it all, because it seems to be waning. If [Harvey] Weinstein is presumed to be low-hanging fruit, then why isn’t he in a courtroom? The only person who’s behind bars is [Bill] Cosby.” Abruptly, he decides that he has had enough of that topic. “We’re almost done,” he announces, though in fact there are still 10 minutes remaining of our allotted time. “What else have you got?”
What I want to hear about are the two roles that have done the most to bring Baldwin back from the brink, to dissuade the public from associating him with temper tantrums and divorce and bad parenting. The most recent is his Emmy-winning performance as Donald Trump, whom he plays on Saturday Night Live with one eyebrow permanently raised and both lips protruding as though trying to suck a lemon through a letterbox. What purpose does he feel his portrayal serves? “Among the American people, there is a level of disgust and even nausea about Trump. Just as his presidency is a chronic condition and it’s not going away any time soon, so the humour – not just me, but all humour about Trump – is the medicine people are taking to quiet the nausea. It’s a see-saw. I do SNL and then by Monday or Tuesday night, they wanna throw up all over again.”
Baldwin recalls once meeting E Jean Carroll, the columnist who alleges that she was raped by Trump in the mid-90s. “I was introduced to her a few years ago when a friend of mine brought her to dinner at a small restaurant in New York, and nothing about that woman led me to believe she was a liar or a sociopath. She’s making a charge of rape – especially at this time – when she knows how the other accusers have been dealt with – she knows what she’s getting herself into. I mean, just look at all the other accusers who’ve been dismissed and have watched the accused having rose petals spread by his supporters for him on a path toward his goal. Carroll knows this going in – she knows that’s where it’s headed.”
The other defining performance in Baldwin’s career came with Tina Fey’s wickedly inventive sitcom 30 Rock. As the calculating and charismatic network boss Jack Donaghy, vice-president of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming, he lent the show his gravitas and style, and it, in turn, reinvented him as a lovable wag with a killer line in comic disdain. What did it teach him about himself? “30 Rock taught me how unfunny I am. My mind was blown by how quick the people on that show were, how sharp Tina was. The first thing off the top of her head was funnier than something it would take me two hours to come up with.” The show ended six years ago. Has he got Jack out of his system yet? “Ah, no,” he replies. “No, no, no. Let’s put it this way. There were no collar stays in my shirt the other day and I was livid as I left my house. Livid. So, yes, Jack is very much still with me.”
And with that, the wheels touch down gently on the tarmac, the cabin lights ping back on and Baldwin wishes me a good day before proceeding safely with his onward journey.
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