Actor George Clooney shared his view on the controversy surrounding the fatal Rust on-set shooting, calling the incident last month in which Alec Baldwin shot a gun that killed a crew member and injured the director “infuriating” and “insane.”
The seasoned actor said he has never heard the term “cold gun” that the assistant director allegedly called out before the fatal discharge to indicate that the weapon was safe to fire. He also said the responsibility for making sure weapons are safe comes down to the “prop person or the armorer, period.”
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“Every time I’m handed a gun on a set — every time, Marc, they hand me a gun — I look at it, I open it, show it to the person I’m pointing it to, show it to the crew every single take,” Clooney told Marc Maron on the comedian’s podcast. “You hand it back to the armorer when you’re done, you do it again.”
Clooney conceded that working with dummy bullets is difficult because of how similar they look to live bullets. Investigators found that the gun fired by Baldwin contained live ammunition instead of dummy rounds.
“It comes down to we need to be better at making sure that the heads of our departments … are experienced and know what they’re doing,” he said, referring to 24-year-old armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed whose job it was to oversee the weapons on the New Mexico set.
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“It’s infuriating that you get to this place where the places that you’re skimping on, and again I want to say that I don’t believe there’s any intent by anybody to do anything wrong — it’s a terrible accident — but a 24-year-old person shouldn’t probably, with that little experience, be heading up a department with guns and bullets,” Clooney said.
Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyers have said they are looking into the live bullets that ended up in the offending weapon as an act of sabotage.
No criminal charges tied to the case have been filed, though an investigation into the safety on the set remains active. Santa Fe County District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies said on ABC’s Good Morning America on Wednesday that “we do not have any proof” of sabotage.
Baldwin has mourned the loss of Hutchins and said he believes Hollywood should learn from the incident and implement new measures to ensure better safety with firearms on set, including having police officers present.
“An ongoing effort to limit the use of firearms on set is something I’m extremely interested in,” he said. “Some new measures have to take place: rubber guns, plastic guns, no real armaments on set. That’s not for me to decide. It’s urgent that you understand I’m not an expert in this field.”
