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Baldwin may not have a bounty on his head, but he has long felt under siege from his more contemporary tormentors \u2014 the tabloid media and political conservatives \u2014 and it has never been easy for him to let things go. His \u201cRust\u201d journey has been a protracted, higher-stakes form of a familiar Baldwin ritual: He does or says something controversial; then, in an attempt to be understood, he doubles down on whatever he said or did, inviting further scrutiny; finally, feeling victimized and aggrieved, he vows to stop engaging with the media. By the time I started working on this article in early April, Baldwin\u2019s lawyers had persuaded him to stop talking to reporters about \u201cRust.\u201d This account is based on more than 30 other interviews conducted in New York and Santa Fe, in addition to public court filings, police records and videos, as well as documents obtained under New Mexico\u2019s freedom-of-information act. <\/p>\n
In 2019, when he first started working with Souza on \u201cRust,\u201d Baldwin was married to a yoga instructor and social media influencer, Hilaria. They already had four young children, with three still to come. Now in his 60s, he was reproducing the sort of large Irish Catholic family he had grown up in on Long Island. He was no longer the in-demand box-office draw that he\u2019d once been, and shooting movies was hard on his young and growing family. But \u201cRust\u201d spoke to him. It was a small independent film with a modest $7.4 million budget, and the plan was to shoot it in just four weeks. He agreed to play the lead and also signed on as a producer, attaching his production company, El Dorado Pictures, to the project. He was to be paid $250,000 for his combined role, plus a percentage of the profits once the movie was sold to a distributor and eventually released. Out of his earnings, he told investigators, he had carved out $50,000 to augment the pay for the actress playing the most prominent female character, who was budgeted to make just $2,100 for a week of work. They had shot close to half of the film when tragedy struck.<\/p>\n