Name: Alec Baldwin Reflects On New Mexico Shooting
Uploaded: 2025-12-06T20:00:19.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Alec Baldwin Reflects On New Mexico Shooting' from TAFS Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Alec Baldwin Reflects On New Mexico Shooting' from TAFS Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-06. Transcript available.

You can walk onto the set with Mamet and you say to yourself, the films he's
directed that he's
written have been less successful than the scripts he wrote that other people
directed.
But that can't influence what you do. You have to go in with people and always
say and think
the best. I'm not just saying this to be warm. You know what I mean? You go in
there, you don't
want to predict failure. I've made movies where the other actor or actress was
someone who
I didn't quite understand what they were doing. And I didn't quite understand
why the director
wasn't on them. Who is it? Liz Lemon? We were all thinking this. She's the
funniest person
on earth. Well, she's such a unique person, you know, because she's so funny in
that way.
I mean, you realize that when I worked with them, I wasn't funny when I worked
with them.
Shut the fuck up. Well, no, no, but I'm being, I mean, I've done some SNL, but
the point is
this, but I really mean this. I learned not to be funny, but I learned what was
funny. A lot of
things you see now on TV, I mean, a ton of it is more cute than funny. And Tina
was funny. I mean,
they'd hand me scripts. We do a Wednesday read-through and they'd hand us the
script on a
Wednesday morning. And I'd read it in the makeup chair. And then we'd go up to
a lunch conference
room, which had cameras to beam us to Burbank for the executives in California
to watch the
read-through at 12 noon. And we'd be, and they'd hand me the script. I'd read
it. I'd go see
Robert Carlock for the lunch read-through and I look at him and I go, are you
fucking kidding
me? You want me to do, are you out of your mind? You want me to do this? Which
was, I was
like a gay Mexican soap opera star playing against myself, doing the Patty Duke
thing. And he's
like, and Carlock always said the same thing. He said, it's a big swing. It's a
big swing.
But we know you can, we have faith in you. It's fun too, right? I never had
more fun
in my life. The scene, there's a particular scene which I think your
performance is a masterclass
in like comedic acting. But it's the scene where you take Tracy to meet the NBC
therapist.
And you play, you play like 12 different characters. I bust up a ship of rope.
Yeah. And he starts engaging. It's just, it is like a perfect scene. I actually
just this
morning remembered another scene of yours, which I literally made me pee my
pants when I was a kid,
really younger. But in Along Came Pauly, when you're pissing next to Ben Stiller,
and then you
like, you tenderly like squeeze his earloof. Yes. And then you start massaging,
especially after
you've been pissing. And you're his boss, of course. It's, it's just, um. I
knew she was a dime
store who at the moment. Dude, I, who had the vision that, like, who knew you
were funny? Because
you're going to do this, like, I, I'm not funny at all. I'm just an actor. But
like,
was it Lorne? Like, did Lorne? I went and did SNL the first time. And what I
learned was,
unless you're Stallone or Schwarzenegger, where they're going to make up fun of
your persona,
they're not going to do that. You got to become one of the company and just
pull your pants down
and make an ass of yourself. Is it more fun? Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I loved SNL
because you would
never, there's things you do that, not all of it, but there were things you
would do that you would
never do anywhere else. Yeah. To have that experience, you had to do that show.
Like, Little Canteen Boy? That's, I don't think he was Little Canteen Boy.
What is it? I think he was Strapping Canteen. Oh, that was what it was. Oh, no,
no, I was,
no, I was the scoutmaster. He was, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we
used to live in a
fucking, Sandler. Better, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Sandler. They got more
complaints about that
sketch than any sketch they had up until then. It was pretty funny, honestly.
Do you, do you ever fear that,
like, your perception as a celebrity might overshadow, like, the very reason
why you're a
celebrity? Well, yeah, you have to be very careful. I tell people all the time
who are young, I'm like,
don't. See, the people who are the biggest stars, you know the least about them.
Yeah. And they
control them. I would be a ghost. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you go out, if they
see you doing things in
public and it's not appealing or attractive, it's not, it's not going to help
you. Like, I mean, I felt
like, if guys were 75 feet away with a long lens and they took a picture, I
never cared. It was when
they got up close and almost hit my wife in the teeth with the lens of their
camera. I mean, I would
get super pissed off, too. That's when I got a little panicky. Yeah, I did get,
I mean, I took the bait
more than months. But it's not the bait. They're fucking hitting your wife in
the face with a camera.
Almost, yeah. Was the first time you got paparazzi, like, kind of cool? Were
you like, dude,
I must be sexy. No, I hated him from day one. You hated him day one. But there's
an Italian guy
following you around. He's like, Bella, Bella, you know, I don't know what they're
like. I've never
gotten one. Well, here it's, here it's gone from like a, you see, you're too
young to remember,
like, here it's gone from like a very, very obscure corner. Yeah. The
entertainment space is a room.
They were often a little corner. And all this kind of salacious gossipy stuff
was very, very, very,
like third or fourth tier. I feel like we didn't know about people's lives. And
now it's an industry.
And now they're going to go on and making a fool of famous wealthy sports
figures, music figures,
entertainers of what else, actors, businessmen, Musk, whoever, politicians to
humiliate them and
embarrass them publicly. That's a huge industry now. Yeah. So they're out there
with nets trying to catch
something. I feel like I'm lucky that I'm not a punching guy. I'm more of a
like, I'll psychologically
destroy the long game. Yeah. You stare at them. Do you think that you were
characterized as a,
as like a, like a bully, a tabloid fixture? As a bully. I bullied these
photographers. I went up to
one girl one time. The guys that were trying to take a picture of your newborn
child? Well, one guy walks
up, he, we're coming out of our building and we're walking down the block and
he's walking backwards.
And he's really big. He's like six, four. He's tall. He's a big guy. You know
what I mean? And he
doesn't pay attention. He trips and falls and sits on a baby in a stroller that's
behind you. Your baby?
No, no. Somebody else. Oh, thank God. A woman's coming this way and he's going
backwards and he falls
onto the, and sits on the baby in the stroller. Yeah. And I thought to myself,
well, I won't say
what I've thought. You're like, it's my fault. No, no. I'm a, I'm a really,
yeah. We should just chop him
up now, right here. I wanted to mention something to you that I've, I've felt
and I've been, it's kind of
like been dawned on me since I was like doing the research for you. And it's
going back to what I
said is like that your celebrity sometimes can, has overshadowed kind of, my
reputation is what you
mean. But it's just like, you use the word celebrity or being coy. Yes, public
life, right? Something I've
picked up on is like, I watched your reality show, right? And why? Because like,
I was being thorough,
but like, it really dawned, the first thought I had was like, is this what you
have to do these days?
Like in, in a moment of extreme, like a personal crisis, like I'm, I'm weeping
in a, in a conference
room with some publicists and I go, what can I do to clean up this massive, and
they go, you can have
seven kids. Is it? But like, what I'm saying is, is like, for me personally, I've,
I've like, I'm not
into like, celebrity gossip. But when I heard about what happened, right, it
didn't sound real to me.
Where? Right? In New Mexico. It didn't sound like a real thing that happened in
the real world. I
think we probably made jokes about it. Like it didn't dawn on me until I was
doing research for
the show. And I, I really felt like it would be something that you would carry
for the rest of your
life. And it's just, it kind of dawned on me that like, people don't perceive
public figures as real
human beings, perhaps.
I think that in that case, among, among, among countless things I could say,
was the idea that
when my case imploded, it was over. And it was over not because of a statement
of a jury or of the
cleverness of my lawyers, the judge ended, it was thrown out. The judge terminated
the trial. She thought
this is enough. This is just insane. And when that happened, a friend of mine,
a woman who's an
attorney, very famous attorney, she said to me that what bothered her was, she
said, once they
couldn't get you, it was over. The case didn't continue. They're not out there
looking for the
guy that brought the bullets onto the set. They're not doing, once they
attempted to frame you and they
couldn't do it, it ended. Which that should be of grave concern to everybody
that lives in that
community that have just imploded because they didn't succeed at their other
thing.
Certainly. And, but beyond that, like, I, I've, I looked at like the way that
it's discussed in
popular discourse and on the internet. Like I looked at Reddit.
Sure.
Well, Reddit's bad.
It's bad, but it's, it seems like people don't process it in a way that, um,
this is
clearly something that is not someone, someone's fault. Instead, they kind of,
in a very unfair way,
assign blame to you. No, it's not funny. Funny is like, at least like...
Well, a lot of it, they try, they think it's funny.
Funny is at least like ironic. I think people that genuinely assign blame for
something that's
like literally, you know, that you'll carry for the rest of your life. And it
really upset me,
especially because I've been like revisiting all your work, that like this,
that this thing could
overshadow like what is so beloved about you.
Well, I mean, on one hand, you say to yourself, you say carry for the rest of
your life. I don't
really carry anything for the rest of my life. Meaning, do I feel overwhelmed
and, and, and pained
by the suffering and the, the tragedy of what happened? Yes. But do I feel
responsible? No.
No. Because what happened was we remember, they decided to leapfrog over or
pole vault over the
whole idea that in the previous several days we were doing the film, we did a
protocol that we did
the same thing. And nobody came up to me in my shooting in the film. You don't
have, yeah.
Well, I just want to say, because you did bring it up, one, two, three, four,
five days,
no one came up to me and said, "Hey, let's do it this way." It was only after
the fact that they said,
"Oh, we're supposed to do it this way." But let me just close. I don't want to,
yeah.
But I'm going to end on a positive note. Yeah, yeah. No, but.
But let me just say this. Yeah, go ahead.
Having my kids and having all these children, I'm 67 years old. I got a three-year-old
baby.
So I got a lot of kids at home, little kids, and they saved my life. And I'm
sure the same is true
with you, which is that you get to the point where, I mean, I'm older now, but
when you get to the point
where you think less about where you get love than where you give love, one of
the more frustrating
and even painful things in life is you have nobody to give your love to. You
might have a lot of love
to give in your heart to people. Your parents are gone, what have you. And with
my kids, it's like,
I have a lot of love to give, and I have all these kids around me all day long,
and I'm not really
doing, I wasn't doing very much for the last three and a half years. Yeah.
I was home all the time, and they saved me. They saved my life.