Alec Baldwin Reveals He Was Bedridden for 8 Days After Rust Shooting

Alec Baldwin says the aftershocks from Rust didn’t just derail his career — they wrecked his health and headspace to the point where he thought seriously about calling it quits.

On the mic: Baldwin gets blunt

On The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, released Monday, April 13, the 68-year-old opened up about how hard the past few years have hit him. He says he barely worked and spent most of his time at home with his kids — three and a half years of it.

"I don’t want to work anymore. I really don’t. I want to retire and stay home with my kids."

That is a pretty stark thing to hear from an actor who has seemed invincible for decades.

Why he went back to finish Rust anyway

Baldwin says finishing Rust in Montana wasn’t a choice so much as a requirement tied to a settlement with cinematographer Halyna Hutchins’ husband, Matthew. The way he describes it, the production had to complete the film and then hand it over to Matthew to sell and manage as he saw fit. It’s a very specific, behind-the-scenes wrinkle — and it meant Baldwin had to show up even while he was in rough shape.

The health spiral he says the ordeal triggered

During that period, Baldwin says he developed orthostatic hypotension — a condition that, in his telling, can show up when you’re on blood pressure medication. In plain English: your blood pressure drops when you stand up, and you can black out. (The Cleveland Clinic describes it as a sudden blood pressure drop after sitting or lying down.)

He says it got scary. Over one St. Patrick’s Day weekend he blacked out three times, once collapsing onto his wife. He spent eight days stuck in bed, then two weeks in physical therapy just to get moving again. And he still had to climb on a horse and get back to Montana to finish Rust or, as he puts it, face a serious lawsuit. He made it, but he’s blunt that the performance wasn’t what he wanted because he was still sick.

His stance on the shooting itself hasn’t changed

Baldwin has maintained since the October 2021 tragedy — when a prop gun he was holding discharged, killing Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza — that he didn’t pull the trigger and didn’t knowingly point a live weapon at anyone. He has said a live round never should have been on that set.

The legal and life timeline, untangled

• Oct 2021: On the New Mexico set of Rust, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins is killed and director Joel Souza is injured when a gun Baldwin is holding goes off.
• Jan 2023: Baldwin is charged with involuntary manslaughter. He pleads not guilty.
• Apr 2023: Those charges are dropped.
• Later: He’s indicted again in connection with Hutchins’ death. At one point, a judge denies his request to toss that indictment, but the case is ultimately dismissed.
• July 2024: Baldwin posts on Instagram thanking supporters and saying their kindness toward his family meant more than they know.
• March 2024: Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed is found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison; her bid for a new trial is denied in Sept 2024.
• He files a lawsuit accusing the prosecution team of malicious prosecution and civil rights violations.
• Feb 2025: On the Baldwins’ TLC reality series, he talks about how surreal and punishing the past year has been, admitting there were days he couldn’t get out of bed — which he says is very much not like him.

Where that leaves him

Between the legal whiplash, the obligation to finish Rust as part of a settlement, and a genuinely scary health scare, Baldwin sounds like someone who wants out — or at least wants to stay home with his kids and let the industry spin without him for a while. Whether that sticks is another question, but for now, he’s saying the quiet part out loud.