There has been considerable controversy surrounding Alec Baldwin after cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was tragically killed on the set of the movie Rust. A clip from a brand new interview with Baldwin brought internet ire upon the actor involved in Hutchins’ death, in which he appears to claim – based on how the trailer of the interview was edited — that he did not pull the trigger on the prop gun at the center of the Oct. 21 incident.
“The trigger wasn’t pulled, I never pulled the trigger,” he said in a trailer previewing his televised interview with George Stephanopoulos. “I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them, never.” You can check out that trailer below.
Baldwin’s narrative has been repeated by others involved with the case including Lisa Torraco, Rust assistant director Dave Halls’ attorney.
“Dave has told me since the very first day I met him that Alec did not pull that trigger,” she said to ABC News. “The entire time, Baldwin had his finger outside the trigger guard, parallel to the barrel. [Halls] told me since day one that he thought it was a misfire. It was a pure accident — freak, awful accident [that] unfortunately killed somebody.”
Given that Halls was reportedly central to an on-set accident on the set of Freedom’s Path, some online observers are skeptical of the claims from either Baldwin or Halls’ attorney on the case — with at least one literally asking, “Why am I skeptical?”
Author Neal Boortz went so far as to call it “bulls**t” that Baldwin didn’t pull the trigger of the gun.
One user on Twitter said that “A gun can’t be fired all by itself,” which is a possible callback to Santa Fe County Sheriff Adam Mendoza, who told Fox News, “Guns don’t just go off” in a story the site published Thursday.
“So whatever needs to happen to manipulate the firearm,” Mendoza added, “he did that and it was in his hands.”
One user shows a diagram of the gun and questioned how it would fire accidentally, something weapons armorer named Bryan W. Carpenter also discussed with Fox News.
“In order to make it fire, you have to put your thumb up onto the hammer, cock the hammer all the way back, and then as the hammer is completely cocked back, then you pull the trigger and then the gun fires. So that’s very important because that gun had to have two-step process to fire. It had to be cocked and the trigger pulled to fire.”
Whether people believe Alec Baldwin or not, it will be interesting to see the full interview with Stephanopoulos when it airs on Thursday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.