“I like charming people,” says Alec Baldwin. “I think it’s the only talent I have.”
Here Baldwin is, perched on a stool in the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in LA, smiling his Cupid’s-bow smile and benignly sipping an iced coffee. Is it safe to ask him why he gets so furious?
“Well, if you have four bad days in four straight years, then all four of them are depicted in the media, then yeah. The other 360 days of the year, when you’re just handing out lollipops and riding unicorns through cotton-candy forests and everything’s so magical, they don’t report that.”
He says his relationship with daughter Ireland, now 12, is “great,” despite the ongoing custody battle.
Later this year, he is publishing a book on the subject of “parental alienation” entitled “A Promise to Ourselves: Fatherhood, Divorce and Family Law.”
Despite a professed hatred for LA, he now splits his time between that city, where Ireland lives with mom Kim Basinger, and New York, where his hit TV show “30 Rock” is filmed.
Does he believe in love and marriage?
“Oh yeah, I do. I’ve been single for seven years and as I get older, I think all I want is to be loved. The world becomes a place where you think, let everyone else have it. Let them all fight over jobs and money . . . You want things in life that are lovely.”
Asked for a catchphrase that best defines his life, he simply says: “Time for a change.”
“I’ve done this now for a long time and I’ve enjoyed it, and the TV show is the greatest job I’ve ever had. But I just feel like there’s other things I want to do. I’m tired. The business has changed.
“You turn around one day, like me – I’m 50 and I don’t want to work as much. I used to be all about work, and now I’m burnt out. I really don’t like working.
“I was the oldest child, always worried about my parents. I was the one who raked the leaves and cut the grass and shoveled the snow and cleaned the dishes,” he says. “My brothers were like hillbillies. They had no sense of responsibility. They played baseball.
The Long Island-born star’s two sisters, Jane and Elizabeth, did not go into acting, but all three brothers – Daniel, William and Stephen – followed in his footsteps with varying degrees of success.
As a lifelong Democrat, he makes no secret of his desire to go into politics “one day.” He has been following the 2008 campaigns and is a regular blogger on the subject for the Huffington Post Web site.
“Could a black man win? Yes,” he says, on the subject of Barack Obama. “This country needs a change, but I’m not sure if a man named Obama can get it. It’s like marketing, like buying laundry soap, soda or corn chips. Will they buy McCain or Obama? What sounds right? A critical mass of Americans don’t think beyond that. They do indeed choose presidents like they do laundry soap.”
Baldwin takes umbrage when he’s compared to that other actor-turned-politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“I’m sick and tired of everybody saying what a great guy he is. For me, his election as governor was offensive.”
If Baldwin went into politics, would he come clean about the skeletons in his closet? He grins.
“I would, but only in the sense that I would say to people: ‘Assume I’ve done everything. I want you to assume I’ve had sex with animals, that I’ve imbibed every kind of drink, that I’ve poured absinthe on my corn flakes during a period of time. I’ve done every debauched, filthy, insidious . . . everything. Just assume that for the argument, and now – next question.’ ”
In “30 Rock,” now in its third season, the characters play a game in which you have to choose whether to boff, marry or kill a random choice of three people. I ask Baldwin to choose between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. Who would he boff, marry or kill?
“I’d boff Hillary,” he says, totally straight-faced.
So that means he believes in gay marriage?
“Well I’d have to because I wouldn’t want to sleep with Barack. Barack would just be my long-term companion, as they say. I’d have to have sex with a woman because I’m not gay. I wouldn’t want to have sex with Barack Obama or McCain. Obama’s wife, perhaps. Anybody’s wife – Bush’s wife, McCain’s wife, but no men – not even operating the video camera.”
He pauses, weighing up all the options with due seriousness.
“So I’d boff Hillary, marry Obama . . . and I wouldn’t want to kill McCain,” he says contemplatively.
“Maybe I’d lead him out into the woods and leave him there, and I’d come back and tell you that I’d killed him. But I’d lie. I wouldn’t really kill him. And knowing McCain, knowing his past in Vietnam, he’d make it back, he’d survive.” © Guardian News and Media Ltd.