Alec Baldwin Opens Up: 'I Want to Stay Home with My Kids' Following 'Rust' Tragedy

Apr 21, 2026 by apost team

The past few years have been among the hardest of Alec Baldwin's life — and he's not pretending otherwise. The actor, 68, recently sat down with The Hollywood Reporter's Awards Chatter podcast, where he opened up about the toll the 2021 shooting incident on the set of "Rust" took on him personally, and how the years that followed quietly reshaped everything he thought he wanted.

Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed on the New Mexico set when a gun Baldwin was holding discharged during a rehearsal. What followed was years of criminal proceedings, public scrutiny, and profound personal grief. Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter twice — first in January 2023, then again in 2024 — before both sets of charges were ultimately dismissed. The second dismissal came during his July 2024 trial after a judge ruled that prosecutors had withheld evidence relevant to how live ammunition ended up on the set.

Through all of it, Baldwin stayed close to home. Wife Hilaria Baldwin, 42, and their seven children became his anchor. "I don't know where I would be if I didn't have her," he told PEOPLE prior to the debut of his TLC series in February 2025. "I don't know what would've happened to me."

That season of stillness lasted longer than most people realized. "I wound up staying home a lot. I was home with my kids for three and a half years," Baldwin said on the podcast. "I hardly worked at all." For a man who had spent decades rarely pausing, that kind of enforced quiet turned out to be transformative in ways he hadn't expected. 

Baldwin shares seven children under 13 with Hilaria — daughters Carmen Gabriela, María Lucía Victoria and Ilaria Catalina Irena and sons Rafael Thomas, Leonardo Ángel Charles, Romeo Alejandro David and Eduardo "Edu" Pao Lucas. He also shares his oldest daughter, Ireland, 30, with ex-wife Kim Basinger. The time he spent at home with his younger children during the "Rust" investigation has clearly left a mark that no amount of work could undo.

He offered a glimpse of what daily life looks like now during the podcast, recounting a recent moment with his son Romeo while picking out ski jackets. Romeo looked at him and delivered a line only a kid could get away with. "What do you know? You're from Long Island," he told his dad. "And that's my life now, day after day after day after day," Baldwin told The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast — and the way he said it made clear he wouldn't trade it.

He does have projects ahead. He recently appeared in the Spanish comedy "Torrente Presidente," portraying Donald Trump, and has "The Cutting Room Floor" in the pipeline, along with a role in "National Lampoon's Hollywood Hustle," where he'll play a fictionalized version of himself. But when podcast host Scott Feinberg quipped that Baldwin never stops working, his response cut right through it.

"For me, because of the situation in New Mexico, that was very painful," he said. "I'm going to go off and do a bunch of things, but I was home, and I got used to it, and I don't want to leave my house anymore. I don't want to work anymore. I really don't. I want to retire and stay home with my kids."

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Are you a fan of Alec Baldwin? Do you think stepping back from work to focus on family is the right move after everything he's been through? Let us know in the comments and pass this on to your family, friends, and other Alec Baldwin fans out there!