It seems that proud New Yorker Alec Baldwin can’t help but face potentially volatile situations on the streets of his hometown, where he risks being provoked by strangers into losing his temper.
According to video uploaded to social media Monday, Baldwin threatened to “snap” the neck of Jason Scoop, a so-called “ambush” comic who donned a Donald Trump wig and mimicked the 47th president while heckling the veteran film actor and newly minted reality TV star about the death of “Rust” cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
“If this camera wasn’t here, I’d snap your (expletive) neck in half and break your (expletive) neck right here,” Baldwin can be heard telling the comedian and influencer.
Scoop cornered Baldwin as the 66-year-old “30 Rock” actor was loading luggage into the trunk of a vehicle outside his Manhattan apartment, as the Daily Beast also reported. It’s not clear when this confrontation took place, but the first episode of Baldwin’s reality TV show, “The Baldwins,” premiered Sunday night. Amid Baldwin’s chaotic home life with his seven young children, his wife Hilaria Baldwin tries to depict him as a lovable curmudgeon who’s often misunderstood because of his famously volatile personality. “I feel like the world very much misunderstands Alec,” Hilaria Baldwin says in the show. “He’s a tender soul. Very raw, especially now.”
Baldwin was definitely trying to contain some raw emotions during his encounter with the bewigged Scoop, who approaches the actor by announcing, “It’s your favorite president.” By mimicking Trump, Scoop also appears to be alluding to Baldwin’s former stint playing Trump on “Saturday Night Live.”
“Look, Alec, I will offer you a total pardon, because I want to be friends, right?” Scoop continues. “I want to be friends. I will give you a total pardon for murdering that woman if you kiss the ring.”
For much of the clip, Baldwin tries to ignore Scoop, but the comic stays uncomfortably close and continues to taunt him by talking about “murdering that woman in cold blood.” Baldwin finally loses it after Scoop says, “She’s looking down on me right now, smiling, happy. ‘Thank you for confronting the man who took me out, who killed me.’”
“You got a camera on me here?” Baldwin finally says to the comic. “You realize my kids live in this building? I want you to know something. I want you to be real careful. If this camera wasn’t here, I’d snap your (expletive) neck in half and break your (expletive) neck right here. You know that, don’t you?”
When Scoop refuses to back off, Baldwin still insists he leave. “I want you to get out of here,” he says, before he decides to “shove that camera up your (expletive).”
Baldwin’s encounter with the heckler comes as he and his wife are using their reality TV show to ease his way back into public life, following the 2021 death of Hutchins on the set of his Western film “Rust.” The TLC show’s dramatic arc spins on the couple trying to parent their children as Baldwin faces prosecution for his role in killing another person.
While rehearsing a scene for the low-budget independent film, a prop gun Baldwin was handling went off. While the gun was only supposed to contain “dummy rounds,” it instead contained a live round that killed Hutchins. Baldwin, who also was a producer for the film, spent the next three years embroiled in a high-profile involuntary manslaughter case that ended in July when a judge dismissed the charges over alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
Baldwin’s reputation was unstable even before Hutchins’ death, despite his more recent success with “30 Rock” and “Saturday Night Live.” His reputation wasn’t helped by his apparent complicity in his influencer wife’s bizarre “identity hoaxer” scandal: In late 2020, Boston-born Hilaria Baldwin was confronted with online evidence that she had spent more than a decade, publicly pretending to a glamorous Spanish immigrant.
Now comes Baldwin’s latest public outburst, around the same time as his show’s premiere. To be sure, he and his wife have their fans who will note that he was being viciously harassed outside their home, and that he was diagnosed with PTSD after accidentally killing Hutchins.
Someone on Scoop’s Instagram account also scolded the comic for the stunt, saying, “This one felt slimy, man. What happened on the Rust set had little to do with Alec, and the court documents prove that. It was a terrible, awful thing. … I would implore you to take this down and issue an apology to Alec and the families of those affected by the Rust shooting.”
To others, Baldwin’s outburst will serve as yet another reminder that he’s famous for losing his temper when provoked.
In 2007, Baldwin left an angry voicemail for his oldest daughter, 29-year-old Ireland Baldwin, amid his bitter custody dispute with his first wife Kim Basinger. Baldwin called his daughter, then 11, a “rude, thoughtless little pig.” Five years later, he was accused of punching a photographer outside Manhattan’s Marriage License Bureau just after tying the knot with second wife Hilaria Baldwin. In 2018, he settled a legal dispute stemming from a New York man claiming that Baldwin punched him in a dispute over a parking spot.
Two months before Baldwin was scheduled to go on trial for Hutchins’ death, he also was caught in another viral clip, trying not to lose his temper in his neighborhood coffee shop when he was confronted by another social media provocateur. That woman, a performance artist and “ambush interviewer” known as Crackheard Barney, also taunted Baldwin for killing Hutchins, prompting him to slap the woman’s phone out of her hand.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether Baldwin’s foray into reality TV will help or hurt his reputation. Some critics haven’t been kind, with Judy Herman of Time saying that the show is uncomfortably “obsessive in its quest to make the Baldwins seem like normal human beings” and to spin Baldwin as “a good guy despite pugnacious tendencies too evident to deny.”
The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan calls the show “dreadful,” suggesting that it appears to use Hutchins’ death for a dramatic arc, even as Hilaria Baldwin insists that their pain can’t compare to what Hutchins’ family has suffered. “Whatever the underlying, distasteful motives the Baldwins’ participation in this may be, the program may simply backfire on its own terms,” Mangan wrote.