Alec Baldwin: ‘You naughty English could fold sex into dentistry’
Playing the fallen car entrepreneur John DeLorean, skewering Donald Trump on SNL, Woody Allen, #MeToo … Why is it so hard to pin the actor down on anything?
A conversation with Alec Baldwin feels rather like being in a holding pattern above New York. Not that it’s boring: on the contrary, talking with this old-fashioned film star and modern-day sitcom god, this part-time Trump antagonist and full-time schmoozy showbiz personality, is an entirely pleasant experience. You are in business class, perhaps even first, and you are happy and sated and stimulated. Spread out invitingly below you are the twinkling lights of Manhattan, where the 61-year-old actor and his 35-year-old wife, Hilaria, own a penthouse apartment. (They also have an 18th-century farmhouse in the Hamptons.) And yet a question presents itself, not unreasonably, as the plane circles the city and each new circumnavigation seems to bring it no closer to terra firma: are we ever going to land?
It is something to do with the circuitous nature of Baldwin’s sentences, the way he riffs and waffles and meanders at will. Nothing can interrupt him, apart from his pets. (“Hold on a second,” he says down the line from New York, and then I hear the words “Girls! Come!” before he returns to the phone to tell me he was “just summoning my dogs”.) It is his appearance in the new docudrama Framing John DeLorean that has occasioned our conversation today. In bite-sized dramatic reconstructions peppered among interviews with the subject’s family and colleagues, Baldwin plays the late automobile executive and inventor, whose gull-winged car was turned into a time machine in Back to the Future but whose life was destroyed by ambition, stupidity and greed. It’s a compelling story that starts with DeLorean relinquishing his position as group executive at General Motors to start his own company and ends with his naive involvement in a cocaine-smuggling operation exposed in an FBI sting.