MAGAZINE "AMERICAN WAY"

 

Magazine "Rock Of Ages"

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Alec Baldwin lives (and loves) the good life of a famous actor. But this savvy star wants more.

To begin to understand what it’s like to be Alec Baldwin, spend a lazy, late-afternoon hour with him in the window seat of a café in Manhattan. Sitting with a good view of the street (and conversely, a good view of the recognizable actor from the street), Baldwin begins conversation midsentence, declaring that “iPads are for girls.” A moment later, he’s pulling from a FedEx envelope handwritten correspondence with Benjamin Steele, a 93-year-old survivor of the Bataan Death March, which impossibly segues to Baldwin’s reveal in a gravelly stage whisper that, just before he had arrived at the Upper East Side eatery, he’d just screened the “most depressing movie I’ve seen in five years” (Inside Job) — and then there’s an interruption.

Alec Baldwin as Blake in the 1992 ­indie film Glengarry Glen Ross

“Hi, Alec, I’d like to give you a great product to try. Just real quick,” says a harried woman who spotted Baldwin from across the street and invited herself to the table. She later identifies herself as an attorney and a cousin of Nikki Haskell, the woman behind Star Caps diet pills, which were found to contain a diuretic ingredient that had been banned by the NFL. But in the meantime, she’s got a skin product for Baldwin. “This is microdermabrasion on a stick. What you do is you just wet the stick. You know all about sticks. Massage a little on your face. Get creamy. Use it just before you shave. OK? Enjoy.”
A polite, grateful Baldwin sits his new skin-care stick alongside the table’s salt and pepper shakers and, with a grin, sums up the five surreal minutes that just passed, asking, “Can there possibly be anything left to say?”

That seems to be the million-dollar question most on the mind of Baldwin, an accidental actor who hints that he’s quitting the business entirely in the next two years. That’s right: Alec Baldwin could be done with acting.

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Baldwin with Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October

The desire to leave acting has been a long time coming for Baldwin, who’s been in the business for more than 30 years. To be fair, the actor has proved his interest for things outside acting: He has been a fill-in host for NPR; he’s also the voice of the New York Philharmonic, hosting its weekly radio show. But the desire to really, truly call it quits becomes most clear to Baldwin when people are after him to get his opinion on topics far beyond his craft, like when a news network asked him to sit in with a show’s anchors to provide post–Election Day commentary.
“In this world where everyone’s asking you to give your opinion, the problem is, you give it. You take the bait, you show up, and you start talking. That’s becoming very reduced for me,” Baldwin says. “For me, everything is about what I’m going to do when the show is over. We have this year, and we have next year, and we’re done.”
The show Baldwin is referring to is, of course, NBC’s 30 Rock, where he plays cantankerous executive Jack Donaghy, a role that has scored him two Emmys and two additional Emmy nominations.
“Working with Alec is inspiring and also incredibly frustrating,” his 30 Rock co-star Jack McBrayer, who plays feckless NBC page Kenneth on the show, says about Baldwin via e-mail. “I love doing scenes with him, and I learn so much; but at the end of the day, you realize that he’s just gifted, and you will never be as good as him. So I just write in my dream journal and cry myself to sleep.”

Baldwin and co-star Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated

The other people crying themselves to sleep might be the show’s producers and writers, once 2012 rolls around and Baldwin’s contract expires. Even if there is an option to extend his six-year deal, Baldwin says he’s not having it. “Wouldn’t do it,” he says. “It’s not meant to say anything negative about the show. There are just other things that I want to do. Do you want to do the same thing your whole life?”
And how about that life he’s had?
Baldwin, 52, grew up in Massapequa, N.Y., the son of a schoolteacher father and a homemaker mother. One of six kids (he has two sisters in addition to his well-known brothers, Daniel, William and Stephen), he went to George Washington University and had every intention of becoming a lawyer. But before he made it to law school, Baldwin, on a dare, tried out for the drama program at New York University — and he got in. In 1980, he was cast in the daytime TV series The Doctors, and he has worked in television, in film and onstage ever since.
All the while, and despite his spate of award nominations and wins across every acting platform, Baldwin has never taken the craft too seriously.
Fellow longtime actor Tim Daly, who is currently on Private Practice, recalls doing theater with Baldwin in Williamstown, Mass. The two were onstage together for A Study in Scarlet, adapted from the A. Conan Doyle novel of the same name. In the great Baldwin timeline, this 1987 play falls between Baldwin’s stint on Knots Landing and his work in films like Beetlejuice, which led to his starring role in 1990’s The Hunt for Red October.
“We were like schoolboys — we couldn’t look at each other in the eye without cracking up,” Daly says. “It was like we had an understanding, that he was really saying ‘Here we are, grown men pretending to be other people.’ ”

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Baldwin with Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live

The line between Baldwin pretending to be another person and Baldwin just being himself is something that has become blurred over the years. And it’s something that’s pretty disconcerting, and it has been weighing heavily on him.
“The one thing about the business is when you walk out the door, you’re that guy, you’re that guy you played,” says Donaghy — er, Baldwin. “The good news is 30 Rock is a smart show, and the audience is a discerning group of people, and for them, they know ‘wink, wink,’ you’re not that guy, but a lot of people don’t. They think you really are. Like, George Reeves killed himself because he found that he wasn’t Superman. That’s not me. I find that doing a TV show, playing the same person for 22 episodes, now in the fifth year, you walk out the door and people really try and make you into that guy, which is weird.” So, why not just settle into film? After all, it’s a venue where Baldwin has been quite successful, having achieved an Academy Award nomination (The Cooler), a BAFTA nomination (It’s Complicated) and National Board of Review awards (The Departed, State and Main, The Cooler) — and that’s just scratching the surface.
“Moviemaking is a high-stakes game. You make a movie, and if the movie sucks [or] doesn’t work, you get hurt. It hurts your career,” he says. While Baldwin, who is credited in 59 different films, according to his profile on IMDB.com, doesn’t name those that fall into the career-hurting category by name, he does recall the way in which Hollywood, at times, has moved away from him before he had the chance to move away from it.
“There’s a shoreline that actually recedes. You make movies, you make hit movies, movies make money, you get a chance to make other movies. Finally, the business changes for you and it becomes like The Sixth Sense,” Baldwin says with a laugh that reveals just how unfunny the whole business can be. “It really is ‘I see dead people’ — and you realize you’re dead. Your force dwindles.”

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Baldwin with Tina Fey on 30 Rock

But with a dwindling force in the big commercial tent-pole studio films comes independent-film opportunity, which begets critical acclaim, which begets new offers and ultimately celebrity — which Baldwin hasn’t totally embraced. After all, Baldwin doesn’t surround himself with many of the trappings typical of the celebrity machine: He’s not on Facebook or Twitter, and he doesn’t roll with any sort of entourage. He doesn’t even watch himself on TV (although he admits that whenever he’s on a plane, he’ll watch scenes of 30 Rock that include his co-stars). No, when it comes to the greater thing that is celebrity, the man who has hosted Saturday Night Live 15 times says, “I never think about that. I never wake up and do the whole ‘mirror, mirror on the wall’ thing; I don’t go there.”
But if we are going to “go there,” it’s fitting to talk about another of the things people often associate with Baldwin, something emblematic of his reluctant clash with modern-day fame — the now infamous message he left for his daughter, Ireland, which was posted on TMZ.com in April 2007. For anyone who somehow missed it, in the recording (which was not released by Baldwin), he goes on a tirade in which he calls his then 11-year-old daughter (whose mother is Baldwin’s ex-wife, Kim Basinger) a “rude, thoughtless little pig.”
After the message was made public, Baldwin appeared in a spate of interviews where he talked about quitting 30 Rock over the incident, and he told Playboy that he even considered suicide. But Baldwin has moved past — if not compartmentalized — that period in his life. “It was a really bad decision. How I feel, which is really complicated because I’ve moved beyond all of it, I do remember,” Baldwin says. In a broader sense, it proved to Baldwin that these days, nothing is forgotten. “Nothing gets forgotten because of the Internet. It lives in this echo chamber.”
All of this is not to say that Baldwin isn’t totally appreciative of where he is today, and you need to look no further than his description of a typical day in the life of Alec Baldwin, brought to you by the gig that is 30 Rock.
“I go shoot the show at Silvercup Studios, right over the 59th Street Bridge. I play a suit-and-tie guy. We shoot my scenes. We’re done shooting at 7:30 or 8:00 every night. I wipe my makeup off, I keep my wardrobe on, I walk into a restaurant and have dinner with my friends, and I have a life,” Baldwin says. “For the last five years, that’s been — other than the quality of the show, other than the people I love, other than the people I met — the lifestyle that’s this great gift.”

Baldwin talks with Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic, hosting the New Year’s Eve Concert (2009) at Avery Fisher Hall, in New York.

Brian Williams, the NBC Nightly News anchor, has worked with Baldwin a number of times, most recently during Williams’ cameos on 30 Rock. The impression he gets of the acting legend — even one who’s thinking of turning in his notice — is that of a very grateful employee. “The feeling you get if you spend any time at all with him is how thankful he is. He’s working, and he loves to work,” Williams says. “He knows it’s a great role. He knows he’s a perfect fit. His respect for Tina (Fey) — his appreciation for her talent, her importance in the industry and what she’s done for him — is palpable.”
Baldwin doesn’t argue with any of that, but he drives the point home: that acting is something he did not want to do. “There was something else I wanted to do, and this kind of fell through a hole, and maybe you know people like this, but celebrities work, make a good living, and part of it was helping other people. You become the force that is taking care of a lot of business for a lot of other people. Wife, family. For me, I felt like, if I quit doing this and decided to do something else, a lot of other people would be in trouble.”

But when the show ends, Baldwin, who will be 54, recognizes he won’t have the same equity to burn as a person a few decades younger. “What am I going to do? I don’t know. When you’re older, you really want to make things count. I want to do things that count. Maybe not even for the world, but for me.”