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You're looking at the cover of next week's New York, with a sullen Alec Baldwin. The headline: "I Give Up". We're going to read how difficult it is to be the famous actor known as Alec Baldwin.



Alec Baldwin wrote an essay called "I Give Up" for New York Magazine. The actor had a troubled relationship with the media and public life in June last year after the funeral of late actor James Gandolfini. A reporter accused his wife Hilaria of live-tweeting the funeral. Baldwin responded by calling the reporter a "toxic little queen".

Then in November, there was a woman accused and later convicted of stalking him. He also reportedly called a photographer a "cocksucking fag". All of that happened when he was trying to build his career as a talk show host for MSNBC. He was eventually fired from the gig because of those two incidents.

Now Baldwin has something to say and he says he's done with it all. In an essay available in full in Vulture, he describes the fallout as "being labeled a homophobic bigot by Andrew Sullivan, Anderson Cooper, and others in the Gay Department of Justice." He flew to Hawaii, for a film shoot, where he spoke with a gay rights group he "admired."
I met with Nick and others from two LGBT organizations. We talked for a while about the torment of the LGBT life many of them have lived while growing up in traditional Hawaiian families. Macho fathers. Religious mothers. We talked a lot about words and their power, especially in the lives of young people.

One young man, an F-to-M tranny, said, "Are you here to get dry-cleaned, like Brett Ratner?" Meaning I could do some mea culpa, write them a six-figure check, go to a dinner, sob at the table, give a heartfelt speech, beg for forgiveness. I thought to myself: Beg for forgiveness for something I didn't do?

I said, "No. I don't want to get dry-cleaned. I don't want to be decontaminated by you, Karen Silkwood–wise, scrubbed down. I want to learn about what is hurtful speech in your community. I want to participate in some programs about that. Or underwrite one. And then, like you, I just want to be left alone."
He writes that he's still trying to understand how everything happened, from an altercation on the street to being wrongly accused of using gay slur.

He declares "I haven't changed, but public life has." As for the gay slur, he swears he never said it and describes what went down that day in his account:
What happened is, a TMZ videographer ambushed me as I was putting my family in a car, and I chased him down the block and said, "Cocksucking motherfucker" or whatever (when I have some volatile interaction with these people, I don't pull out a pen and take notes on what I said). I knew that guy. This was a guy who is on a bike usually, and when we get in a car, he follows us. Very aggressive. The same guy who followed my wife on a bicycle, and when she slipped and fell trying to dodge him and hurt her leg, he laughed at her and said, "See what I made you do?" At my wife. How would that make you feel?
Baldwin says he would never scream faggot. Or did he?
But—I'm sorry, I can't let go of this—do people really, really believe that, when I shouted at that guy, I called him a "faggot" on-camera? Do you honestly believe I would give someone like TMZ's Harvey Levin, of all people, another club to beat me with?
Then he even had to work with Shia LaBeouf.
I'd heard from other people that he was potentially very difficult to work with, but I always ignore that because people say the same thing about me. When he showed up, he seemed like a lot of young actors today—scattered, as he was coming from making six movies in a row or whatever.

There was friction between us from the beginning. LaBeouf seems to carry with him, to put it mildly, a jailhouse mentality wherever he goes. When he came to rehearsal, he was told it was important to memorize his lines. He took that to heart and learned all his lines in advance, even emailing me videos in which he read aloud his lines from the entire play. To prove he had put in the time. (What else do you do in jail?) I, however, do not learn my lines in advance. So he began to sulk because he felt we were slowing him down. You could tell right away he loves to argue. And one day he attacked me in front of everyone. He said, "You're slowing me down, and you don't know your lines. And if you don't say your lines, I'm just going to keep saying my lines."

We all sat, frozen. I snorted a bit, and, turning to him in front of the whole cast, I asked, "If I don't say my words fast enough, you're going to just say your next line?" I said. "You realize the lines are written in a certain order?" He just glared at me.
Of MSNBC:
So I'm going to go on MSNBC, and people are speculating, "Oh, here he comes! Crazy liberal! And what's he going to do? Is he going to try to give Bill Maher a run for his money? Is he going to try to give Jon Stewart a run for his money?" And I think, Are you out of your fucking mind? Those men are stars of established, highly successful shows. That's never going to happen. My show was meant to be as harmless and inoffensive as could be. There was one theme to the 52 episodes of the WNYC podcast and only one way it worked—the show was about appreciation. I wasn't out to get anybody or make anybody look bad, because I know what that's like.

Ultimately, it was all Rob Lowe's fault according to him.
The first name they came up with was Rob Lowe. They said, Rob Lowe's going to be in the building. Do you want to interview Rob? I said, "Not particularly." Rob's a famous star of films, TV. He's Rob Lowe. He's famous. But there's no shortage of outlets for him. And they looked at me like, You really don't get it. I think they thought, You should have just said yes, simply to play the game. I should have simply said, "Sure, bring in Rob Lowe."
He goes on to talk about how the gay media is out to destroy him still.
I ended up attacking a reporter who wrote in the Daily Mail online that my wife was tweeting from Jimmy'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. In my rage, however, I called him a "toxic little queen," and, thus, Anderson Cooper, the self-appointed Jack Valenti of gay media culture, suggested I should be "vilified," in his words. I didn't feel bad about the incident.
"At the time, I didn't view 'toxic little queen' as a homophobic statement," writes Baldwin. "I didn't realize how those words could give offense, and I'm sorry for that." Could Harvey Levin, TMZ's king of gossip be the one to blame for that?
Then this other thing happens with TMZ and then it becomes a one-two punch. All this is based on the fact of them believing what I said on a video.

Harvey Levin exists in his own universe. He's this kind of cretinous barnacle on the press. Levin told the world that that muffled sound on the video—Levin wanted everyone to know he knows what it is. You don't know, and I don't know, but Levin knows, and he tells the world that it's "faggot."

I get angry, and I've said all sorts of things in anger, but I'd never use that word. Levin has so little regard for the truth, which is odd, knowing he was once a legal correspondent for the CBS affiliate in L.A. He's also the one who revealed the tape that my ex-wife's lawyers provided of me yelling at my daughter seven years ago. Knowing that none of it would have transpired if I hadn't left the message in the first place, I think he hurt my daughter more than anyone.

In the recent video, you see me completely riled up and going after this guy and you hear me saying "cocksucker" and then some bisyllabic word that sounds like "faggot"—but wasn't. Still, it doesn't matter. glaad comes after me and Anderson Cooper comes after me and Andrew Sullivan comes after me, all maintaining that I'm a hateful homophobe. All based on what Harvey Levin told them.
Baldwin was fired by MSNBC following the back-to-back incidents, and now he pretty much hates the media:
Now I loathe and despise the media in a way I did not think possible. I used to engage with the media knowing that some of it would be adversarial, but now it's superfluous at best and toxic at its worst. If MSNBC went off the air tomorrow, what difference would it make? If the Huffington Post went out of business tomorrow, what difference would it make? Arianna Huffington accomplished what she wanted to accomplish. She created this wonderful thing. And what have they done with that? They want clicks, I get it. They've gotta have clicks for their advertisers, so they're going to need as much Kim Kardashian and wardrobe malfunctions as possible. The other day, they had a thing on the home page about pimples. Tripe. Liberal and conservative media are now precisely equivalent.

He says that "[T]his is the last time I'm going to talk about my personal life in an American publication ever again."
It's good-bye to public life in the way that you try to communicate with an audience playfully like we're friends, beyond the work you are actually paid for. Letterman. Saturday Night Live. That kind of thing. I want to go make a movie and be very present for that and give it everything I have, and after we're done, then the rest of the time is mine. I started out as an actor, where you seek to understand yourself using the words of great writers and collaborating with other creative people. Then I slid into show business, where you seek only an audience's approval, whether you deserve it or not. I think I want to go back to being an actor now.

Pretty interesting read. Check it out in full here.