American actor, Alec Baldwin, fiercely insisted he was not to blame in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of a Western being filmed in New Mexico, claiming that another person had accidentally placed a live round in the gun that went off in his grasp as he was rehearsing a scene.
“Someone put a live bullet in a gun, a bullet that wasn’t even supposed to be on the property,” Mr Baldwin said in a television interview that was broadcast on Thursday night. “Someone is responsible for what happened, and I can’t say who that is, but I know it’s not me,” he added.
Mr Baldwin made the comments in an emotional ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos, the first time that Mr Baldwin has publicly given an account of what happened in October, New York Times reports.
The actor’s description of the episode may cast greater scrutiny on crew members and suppliers and the question of who was responsible for safeguarding firearms in the low-budget production.
In the interview, excerpts from which had been released on Wednesday, Mr Baldwin also said that he did not pull the trigger of the gun he was practising with on the set of “Rust” when it fired a live round.
“I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them — never,” Mr Baldwin said.
The fatal shooting took place on October 21 near Santa Fe, N.M., on a movie set designed to be a church. Mr Baldwin was practising drawing an old-fashioned revolver that he had been told contained no live rounds when it suddenly fired, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, and wounding its director, Joel Souza, 48.
Mr Baldwin said that he was stunned by what happened and that at least 45 minutes passed after the gun went off before he realized that it could have contained a live round.
“I stood over her for 60 seconds as she just laid there kind of in shock,” Mr Baldwin said.
The actor added that he did not cock the hammer of the gun, but pulled it back as far as he could and let it go in an action that might have set it off.
“I let go of the hammer — bang, the gun goes off.”
Investigators are seeking to determine how a live round got into the gun that Mr Baldwin was practising with, why the crew members who inspected it on set failed to notice, and why the gun fired.
As detectives work to trace the source of the live round, one focus has been on Seth Kenney, who supplied blanks and dummy rounds for the production.
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According to court documents filed on Tuesday, detectives are trying to determine whether Mr Kenney sent live ammunition as well as blanks and dummies, and they have searched his business in Albuquerque, PDQ Arm & Prop.
Mr Kenney said in an interview that he was confident he was not the source of any live round.
“It is not a possibility that they came from PDQ or from myself personally,” he told “Good Morning America.”
Since the fatal shooting, two crew members who were in the room when the gun went off have filed separate lawsuits, naming Mr Baldwin, the film’s producers and other crew members including Mr Halls and Ms Gutierrez-Reed as defendants.
Both lawsuits say Mr Baldwin should have checked the gun himself to see whether it was safe to handle.
In the interview, Mr Baldwin said that on the day of the shooting, one of the plaintiffs touched his shoulder and said he bore no responsibility for what happened.
Mr Baldwin declined to say which plaintiff it was. Serge Svetnoy, one of the crew members who filed suit, told ABC that he did say that to Mr Baldwin but later changed his mind.
The actor insisted that the tragedy occurred after he was handed the gun and was told it was safe, and that Ms Hutchins herself had told him how to position it. Both he and Ms Hutchins assumed the gun was safe to handle, he said.
“I am holding the gun where she told me to hold it,” Mr Baldwin said. “I can’t imagine I’d ever do a movie that had a gun in it again,” he added.
