Boss Baby Alec Baldwin doesn’t shy away from playing unlikeable characters
IT’S not uncommon for actors to stress about playing the unlikeable bad guy. Alec Baldwin explains why he’s not one to shy away from a challenge.
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ALEC Baldwin has never shied away from playing unpleasant characters — in fact he’s made it an integral part of his career.
There’s his two-time Emmy award-winning turn in Tina Fey’s comedy series 30 Rock as bombastic TV executive, Jack Donaghy. And shady casino boss Shelly Kaplow in the 2003 romantic drama The Cooler, which earned him and Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Or his disgraced, duplicitous fraudster opposite Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen’s black comedy, Blue Jasmine.
And he’s totally fine with being unlikable on screen — all the more work for him.
“I am hard-pressed to remember or figure out where I cross that line to play these parts where you become like Lee J. Cobb (the revered 1950s actor who starred in 12 Angry Men and On the Waterfront) — this authoritative kind of tough person,” he says.
“A lot of actors who are phenomenally successful and have the greatest careers like Hanks and Cruise, they don’t want to play that negative value. They want to play the hero, someone that is likeable. So when you become that guy who will do that (bad guy role), and let’s assume that maybe you do it fairly well, then you have no shortage of offers to play that part.
“My friends will say to me, ‘What’s your dream role?’ And I say, ‘To play Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird — something achingly sweet and vulnerable, where there isn’t a drop of this strident, pushy character’.”
Baldwin’s latest role is providing the voice of the title character in the new animated comedy, The Boss Baby.
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From the director of Madagascar, Tom McGrath, it’s is told from the perspective of seven-year-old Tim (voiced by Miles Bakshi), who has to come to grips with the arrival of his rather unusual younger brother, who turns out to be a secret agent in a secret war between babies and puppies. Lisa Kudrow and Jimmy Kimmel give voice to the ’ parents, while Tobey Maguire serves as the older Tim and narrator.
“I did many, many sessions in the recording booth over the course of two years,” Baldwin says of his work on the film.
It’s not the first time he’s voiced an animated character, following roles as a lion in Madagascar 2 and Santa Claus in Rise Of the Guardians. And if there are any similarities between the Boss Baby and a certain 45th President of the United States, they are purely intentional. After decades in the business, Baldwin has found himself front and centre in popular culture thanks to long-running guest role on US comedy show Saturday Night Live as an eerily good Donald Trump.
“Well, I can’t argue with you,” he says with a laugh of the Trump/Boss Baby comparisons.
Indeed the movie’s poster — featuring the besuited Boss Baby with pursed lips, glowering expression and the words ‘Born Leader’ emblazoned above the infant’s head — proves the point.
“There are some similarities, especially the lack of happiness in that picture,” Baldwin nods, glancing at the image as the promotes the film in an LA hotel.
“As an actor who studies other people, I was completely convinced that when Trump won, he would completely transform himself. Like in sports, when you beat the hell out of somebody and you win, you shake hands, maybe have a beer together, and you’re a more polite, obliging person. But with Trump, there was none of that.”
He shakes his head and laughs.
“He was as bitter and miserable after he won as he was before. That is a complete mystery to me.”
Baldwin looks again at the poster.
“It’s possible that Trump was unhappy as a child — or the opposite. Maybe he was very happy and then something went away, like Rosebud in Citizen Kane.
He deadpans a possible trailer voiceover: “There was joy and happiness, then it just ended ... and he wasn’t ready for it to stop. So he’s gone on to build Xanadu and to chase his dreams all through money and power.”
Ironically, some say Baldwin’s impersonation of Trump has inadvertently helped to make the President more likeable.
“There were people who came to me after the election and said, ‘Well, how do you feel that you are, to some degree, responsible for Trump winning the election?’,” he recalls. “I thought they were kidding, but they said, ‘You humanised him. You took the edges off and made him more personable’.
“I don’t agree with that.”
Baldwin has been married since 2012 to Hilaria Thomas, a yoga instructor, and the couple are raising a daughter and two sons, aged from three years to six months. His previous seven-year marriage to Kim Basinger ended in famously acrimonious circumstances in 2000.
The split was chronicled in Baldwin’s 2008 autobiographical book A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey through Fatherhood and Divorce. His relationship with their daughter, Ireland, who is now 21, sparked controversy when an angry message he left calling her “a rude, thoughtless pig” was leaked online.
Now Baldwin is gearing up for his second book release, Nevertheless: A Memoir.
“I talk about some of the unpleasant experiences that I’ve had and what I’ve learned,”
he explains of the new effort. “The toughest part of it was to talk about how I never got it right with my career.
“Growing up, my family had no money, and when I left home I was completely poised towards making money. What I should have done was go to Wall Street, not have a creative career; because when you have a creative career and you chase money, those two things can be antithetical.
“So I did not nurture my career, I did not do what I might have done to help my career. Instead, I chased money in order to support my family.”
He smiles, shrugging his shoulders.
“But it is what it is.”
While he’s been a regular and respected presence on the big and small screen for some time, Baldwin is clearly enjoying his Trump-led Zeitgeist moment — but not taking it too seriously.
“The first time I did Trump on SNL,” he recalls, “I had no idea what I was going to do seconds before I went on. Of course I watched him and had seen him doing the debates. I saw the way he juts his mouth.”
He strikes one of his Trump poses.
“The wig takes care of the physical and the rest is in the writing. Just like 30 Rock, I am the beneficiary of great writing.
“People thank me for ‘the resistance’ that I’m participating in, but I don’t see it that way. I don’t mind if people do, but I don’t do it for that reason. I do it to entertain people. It’s purely about entertainment.”
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