Alec Baldwin is done with it all. New York, MSNBC, the rest of media, fame, paparazzi, everything. So how is he saying goodbye? In private, moving with his wife and new baby and laughing as the paparazzi tries to stake out his old apartment? Nope, it’s in a 5,000-word rant in New York magazine that the actor says, “I probably have to move out of New York.”
“I just can’t live in New York anymore,” Baldwin says. “Everything I hated about L.A. I’m beginning to crave. L.A. is a place where you live behind in a gate, you get in a car, your interaction with the public is minimal. But New York has changed. Manhattan is like Beverly Hills. And the soul of New York has moved to Brooklyn, where everything new and exciting seems to be … I want my newest child to have as normal and decent a life as I can provide. New York doesn’t seem the place for that anymore.”
Oh that’s not all though. Baldwin insists the representation of him as a homophobe is completely wrong. “I’m sorry, I can’t let go of this,” he says about his alleged anti-gay remarks. “Do you honestly believe I would give someone like TMZ’s Harvey Levin, of all people, another club to beat me with?”
Baldwin blames smartphones and the Internet for all this. Now everyone is a photographer, anyone can tweet a photo, and everyone does. “It’s … unnatural.” As in, now everyone knows about your behavior?
Baldwin explains how unfair MSNBC was to fire him—although he insists he didn’t even want the show in the first place. He calls Rachel Maddow “ultimate wonk/dweeb” and a “phony,” but “talented;” Joe Scarborough is “neither eloquent nor funny;” Mika Brzezinski is the “Margaret Dumont of cable news” (tip: nobody under 50 gets that reference, Alec); and Baldwin likes Lawrence O’Donnell but “he’s too smart to be doing that show.” “The problem with everybody on MSNBC is none of them are funny, although that doesn’t prevent them from trying to be,” Baldwin writes. So Baldwin must have been really popular around the halls of 30 Rock, huh?
Although it seems there is no scandal too small for him to address, unmentioned is the November 2013 stalker trial. The defendant, actress Genevieve Sabourin, was sentenced to 210 days in jail for allegedly stalking Baldwin–although she claimed they had slept together.
But back to things Baldwin wants to explain. The Shia LaBoeuf orphans scandal (does anyone even remember that one?): he insists that he did not call for LaBeouf to be fired. Baldwin very gallantly offered to leave, but the director, Dan Sullivan, wouldn’t let him. And then Sullivan “played both sides.”
“Broadway has changed, by my lights,” he says. “The TV networks, too. New York has changed. Even the U.S., which is so preposterously judgmental now. The heart, the arteries of the country are now clogged with hate … I think America’s more [expletive] up than it’s ever been.”
In short: Goodbye, cruel world.
