On Thursday, the Santa Fe County, New Mexico’s District Attorney’s office blazoned that they would charge actor Alec Baldwin with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 accidental payoff of Halyna Hutchins, photographer on the set of the film Rust. Baldwin, who was the bone
who discharged the gun that killed Hutchins during a trial, believing it to be loaded with dummy pellets, is being charged along with head armorer and mount adjunct Hannah Gutierrez- Reed. These charges may come as a surprise — the hunt leave for the disquisition attested that Baldwin, who was also a patron on the film, had been told that the gun was safe to shoot. Baldwin maintains his innocence, claiming that he feels grief, but not guilt.
We sat down with entertainment counsel Tre Lovell to estimate the meaning of these felonious charges. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What reasons are prosecutors giving to support issuing this charge related to Baldwin’s role as a producer?
They’re saying that because he’s a producer, he’s in charge of the
production, of set safety, of making sure that there’s enough personnel
to be able to govern safety, [that] there’s no shortcuts in spending and
corners cut, things like that. I’ll equate it to a premises liability
type of situation, just that he was in charge of set safety.
As for the actor part, how is it possible for him to be charged
if he was told that the gun was a cold gun and wasn’t loaded with live
ammo? How much is that his responsibility as an actor?
First of all, it’s not his responsibility as an actor to ensure prop
safety. There’s somebody on set specifically to do that, who’s an
expert. Actors, they’re not even allowed to do that. What
people don’t understand is, the Screen Actors Guild, the union, does not
allow any producer, anybody, to use an actor for anything on set other
than acting. You can’t use an actor to help decorate, to do lights, to
do locations. He or she just can act, and that’s it. And there’s a
reason for that, because there are other delegable duties that people
have on set and that they’re supposed to do. An actor is required to
rely upon an armorer, or any other person on set, who’s an expert, when
it comes to whether or not a piece of equipment that they’re using is
safe.
I mean, imagine the world we’re in if they were requiring actors to now
check equipment! What’s next? What if an actor is driving a car in a
scene and the brakes go out and he kills somebody? Are we now going to
charge him for criminal negligence? What if he’s using a sword or some
other explosive on set that is defective and kills somebody, we’re now
going to look at the actor? I mean, this is a slippery slope.
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