If you still think Alec Baldwin is a talented actor, and lest you retain some of the glow from the memory of his enjoyable role as Jack Donaghy on “30 Rock," let him disabuse you of that
feeling.
Yup, in this week’s “as told to” cover story in the new biweekly New York
magazine, (which is pretty great, by the way) the Angry One feels compelled to offer 5,000 words of sadly delusional self ‘splainin.
Not that we asked.
But he happily
opens up about each one of his foul-mouthed, volcanic behaviors in the last two years, or at least the ones that were reported.
And by the end, he feels so betrayed by his people and his
city that he (sort of) promises to retreat from Manhattan and the media eye forever.
If only.
First of all, his timing is bad. We were really enjoying the silence. Instead, this is a
perfect primer for other rich-and-famous celebs who see themselves as victims and feel compelled to share the pain of being them: Spare us your unique brand of Greatness. You’ll only dig
yourself in deeper.
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Mostly it seems that Baldwin, the husband/father/philanthropist and all-around giver, wants to clear the air on the homophobia charges.
I’ll save you about a
thousand words of deep, festering self-justification, and won’t go into every one, but basically his excuse is that he was protecting “MYWIFE!” And the mother of his child. (Just
like that other pious husband, Michael Corleone, in “The Godfather.”) His wife’s privacy is sacrosanct. (Even though she tweets pictures of herself, legs akimbo in a cocktail dress
and 4-inch Louboutins, pulling an upside-down yoga move on a hotel table in Spain.)
“I ended up attacking a reporter who wrote in the Daily Mail online that my wife was tweeting from
Jimmy’s (Gandolfini’s) funeral. He was wrong—in fact, at a later time, she had retweeted items whose original time code matched the time of the funeral.”
Oh, I get it.
That makes sense, and surely explains his fury in calling the reporter a “toxic little queen.” And also calling a photographer who came near his car a “cocksucking
motherfucker.”
“Or whatever,” he adds. “When I have some volatile interaction with these people, I don’t pull out a pen and take notes on what I said.”
Duly noted.
What he wants to make transparently clear is that he has never, nor would he ever, use the word “faggot.” However, this doesn’t stop him from more
amazingly gratuitous name-calling in this very piece, including berating Anderson Cooper as “the self-appointed Jack Valenti of gay media culture.”
Whatever that
means.
He has insults for everyone who dareth protest. And like a five-year-old, he offers hollow, sham excuses for everything.
The reason “Orphans” on Broadway closed
quickly was because his sometime fellow actor, Shia Le Bouef, had a “prison mentality” and therefore insisted on learning his lines early. (The little cretin!)
“I however, do
not learn my lines in advance. So he began to sulk because he felt we were slowing him down.” But Baldwin wasn’t the one who got Shia fired, if you must know.
And here’s how
he describes his interaction with the celebrated director of "Orphans," Daniel Sullivan: “I was working with an older, more enervated Sullivan, who didn’t have the energy for
any of this.”
It’s the same story with Baldwin's MSNBC show. He merely wanted to do a version of his radio podcast on TV, something rare, tiny and beautiful, and Phil Griffin, the
idiot head of MSNBC, insisted that “TV, with its visual component, was different.” But being a go-along guy, Baldwin says, “Okay, I would try it their way. “
(TV
with a visual component? What are they, batshit crazy? )
In his morass of glacial non-self-awareness, I’m sure he had no idea that in attacking Griffin and the copter he flew in on, he
is really describing NBC exec Jack Donaghy, the very character Baldwin played on “30 Rock.”
Of course, this role as the cool, cruel, and smooth Jack has earned
Baldwin love, money, awards and the biggest success he’s ever had. The show was all about mocking the venal conventions of television, and NBC in all of its divisions (including Microwave
Oven Programming) in particular.
Obviously, Baldwin doesn’t get the irony, and it’s rich.
“Phil is a veteran programmer who knows well the corridors and
chambers of television programming—and couldn’t give a flying fuck about content,” Baldwin writes. “All he wanted to talk about was Giants tickets, Super Bowl tickets,
restaurants, movies.”
Has Baldwin no memory of his own lines? Jack was the guy who went out every evening in a tuxedo. (“What, am I a farmer?” he responded to those who
thought it was perhaps a mite formal.)
Donaghy couldn’t be bothered with watching his own news shows: "Typical liberal media. That's why I get all my news from Dick Cheney's
website, dickviews.com."
With this piece, Baldwin has made himself even more of a pathetic laughingstock, and his gratuitous comments have hurt a lot of people. (His daughter Ireland, for one,
can’t be thrilled that he described his new wife as “the most important person in my world,” second only to his new baby.)
In his mind, he is a tortured martyr -- mortally
and morally wounded. When all he wants to do is give.
So why can’t New Yorkers see that and carry him around in a sedan chair? With his wife doing back flips and yoga poses behind him,
of course!
Perhaps we won’t get the chance. He claims we have forced him to consider moving to L.A., to a gated community.
I guess there will be an O.J. quality to seeing
whom he can mow down in his Range Rover rage.
And really, Alec Baldwin, all we want to hear out of you is, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to give it anymore.