Alec Baldwin Melbourne visit: Hollywood star’s first visit to Australia for Italian festival
THE irony of travelling to Australia to celebrate Italy isn’t lost on for his first time visitor Alec Baldwin. The actor speaks to Megan Miller ahead of his visit to Melbourne.
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IN this age of frequent flyers and global citizenship, it’s somewhat surprising to learn that Hollywood hot property Alec Baldwin has never been to Australia.
He’s had two opportunities — one 20 years ago to make a film he declines to name because it went to another actor (he couldn’t commit to the four-month shoot Down Under because he and then-wife Kim Basinger had just welcomed daughter Ireland) and a second chance about a decade ago to shoot a movie in Melbourne about Australia during World War II.
“It was a great script but that died because the funding didn’t come through,” he laments down the phone from his native New York.
The actor will rectify all this in February, making his debut visit as the face of the La Dolce Italia Festival and the guest of honour at its charity gala ball at Crown on February 27.
Rome-born screen siren Sophia Loren was the festival’s guest in April this year.
But what are Baldwin’s Italian bonafides?
He calls himself an Italophile, loves the country’s food, wine, music and art, and was given the 2014 Friend of Italy Award, which honours those who promote Italian culture abroad.
In his accomplished three-decade film and television career, he’s shot two movies in the Italian capital — Woody Allen’s 2012 To Rome With Love and, more recently, sci-fi flick Andròn: The Black Labyrinth with Danny Glover.
“Each time my wife and I go there, we fall more in love with Rome,” Baldwin says.
“Rome is one big historic site everywhere you go. You need to spend a couple of months there just to absorb everything.
“I love it. I love Europe in general.”
Baldwin’s wife of three years, Hilaria, hails from Spain. They’ll be visiting her family in Madrid
this month.
The Australian trip is likely to be a quick one for Baldwin, considering Hilaria and the couple’s two young children — daughter Carmen, 2, and son Rafael, six months — won’t be travelling with him at this stage.
“I hate being away from my kids … but my wife’s very much a beach person, a sunworshipper,
so no doubt I’ll have to bring her down there eventually,” he says.
The irony of travelling halfway around the globe to celebrate Italy isn’t lost on Baldwin.
“At the same time,” he says, “I’ll take it. I’ve been dying to come down there. I wish I could spend more time. I’m very excited.
“Everyone has a recommendation for a hotel, a restaurant, a beach, but one of the things
I like about these events, you have the other side of that … I like being immersed in people and interacting, and not isolated in a hotel room or under your umbrella at some groovy beach somewhere, sipping your drink, looking at everyone else over there.
“I’m glad I’m coming somewhere where I’m going to be hanging out with a couple of thousand Australians for a couple of days and getting to know them. I find that very appealing.”
At 57, Alec is the oldest and probably best-known of acting’s four Baldwin brothers, with William (Billy), Stephen and Daniel.
He says he’s been “uncharacteristically busy” lately.
He’s just wrapped filming alongside Demi Moore in New York on Blind, in which he plays a novelist who loses his vision in a car crash that kills his wife. Next month he starts shootingcomedy Drunk Parents with Salma Hayek.
Out next year will be Concussion opposite Will Smith and a small role in Downsizing, starring Reese Witherspoon and Matt Damon.
Baldwin also had a small part in Warren Beatty’s upcoming film about reclusive billionaire aviator, movie producer and businessman Howard Hughes.
It’s been decades in the making for Beatty, who’s directing as well as portraying Hughes, alongside an all-star cast, also including Martin Sheen, Matthew Broderick and Beatty’s wife Annette Bening.
Baldwin plays Robert Maheu, Hughes’s right-hand man in Las Vegas.
“From everything I’m told — because Warren is calculated and very private — from those who’ve seen some of the movie, they say it’s really wonderful,” Baldwin says.
“On the set with Warren, it was very exciting and made you sad in a way that he doesn’t make more films.
“He’s so deliberate that he makes films very rarely. It was such a pleasure to shoot with him. I wish he made more movies because he’s so good at it.”
Baldwin says if he wasn’t an actor, he’d be a conductor in a symphony orchestra.
He’s long been a patron of the arts, and is on the boards of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the historic Guild Hall arts centre and gallery in the Hamptons.
He’s also co-chairman of the Hamptons International Film Festival board and is aligned
with several other causes, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Coalition for the Homeless.
“I used to be engaged politically, very into politics,” he says, “but that’s become less.
“It’s still important who’s running for office, what the issues are, and how we govern our society, but I found the people who are running for office were just less and less impressive to me.
“There are only so many hours in the day so I gradually turned my attention — it was like steering a ship, getting into this lane of wanting to work with the arts.
When you’re lying there dying at the end of your life, you don’t remember a Bill your congressman passed, you remember a song, you remember a poem, you remember a scene from a movie, you remember a photograph, a painting.
“It’s the arts that gets into people’s blood and stays there.”
Baldwin endorsed Barack Obama in his two successful presidential campaigns and toyed with running for office himself, but says he was “cured of that a little while ago”.
“I was involved in playing politics and raising money for issue-related campaigns and candidacies …. and I found I was just bored to death,” he says.
“Politics in the United States is like a television channel with very few shows on. It’s the same stuff, the same people saying the same things over and over again.“
In 2013, Baldwin first announced he would not donate any more money to political candidates while hosting his own TV talk show, Up Late with Alec Baldwin.
The show only lasted five episodes, pulled by MSNBC after his alleged offensive anti-gay slur towards a New York Post photographer. Baldwin reportedly called the snapper a “c---s---ing f----t.
He disputed using the second word — he maintains he said “fathead” — but apologised for the first.
(It was hardly Baldwin’s first offence for angry outbursts. In 2011, he was kicked off an American Airlines flight for refusing to turn to phone off for take off — he was playing the online game Words with Friends — and allegedly becoming “violent, abusive and aggressive” towards a cabin crew member.)
Following the incident with the photographer, he wrote: “Am I a homophobe? Look, I work in show business. I am awash in gay people, as colleagues and as friends.
“I’m doing Rock of Ages one day, making out with Russell Brand.
“Soon after that, I’m advocating with Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Cynthia Nixon for marriage equality,” he wrote in New York Magazine.
“I’m officiating at a gay friend’s wedding. I’m not a homophobic person at all.”
Interestingly, Baldwin’s daughter Ireland, now 20, has identified as gay, walking hand-in-hand last year with her on-again, off-again rapper girlfriend Angel Haze on the red carpet for the MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles.
BALDWIN’S wife Hilaria, 31, is a yoga instructor famed for flaunting her enviable post-baby figure after both births on social media. He laughs when asked if he’s a yoga devotee.
“My wife’s class is very fast-paced and rigorous and I don’t think I could ever keep up with her,” Baldwin chuckles.
“There’s a gang of my friends who live on Long Island with me and we take yoga for the month of August when we’re all out there for a piece of the summer, but the yoga I take I call ‘middle-aged-white-man yoga’.
The yoga my wife teaches is real yoga so I have no place in her class.”
The couple met in a restaurant in New York in 2011.
“I found myself staring at this poor woman. I wound up introducing myself. Something had to go right.”
Baldwin’s 2002 divorce from Basinger and their bitter custody battle over their only child, Ireland, made headlines for years.
The lowest low came in 2007, when Baldwin famously called then 11-year-old Ireland a “rude, thoughtless little pig” in a leaked voicemail message.
He was incensed her phone was turned off during a court-approved access call.
Father and daughter recently poked fun at the incident when Ireland posted a pic on Instagram of her dad reading the kids’ book If I Were a Pig ... with the caption “If I Were A Pig ... I would be Rude and Thoughtless of course!”
In 2008, Baldwin wrote the book A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce about how the family law system fails men after divorce.
He has called it the book he never wanted to write.
It chronicled his experience with judges, court-appointed therapists and lawyers in his seven-year battle to stay part of his daughter’s life, during which time he says he spent more than $1.4 million and had to take time out from his career to maintain a relationship with Ireland.
He’s back behind the keyboard again to pen his memoir, Nevertheless, due out next year.
“I’ve found it to be very trying to write,” he confides.
“To write about your life and what you put in and what you omit is very tough.
“Because you want to be very careful what you say about people in your life, but you want to tell the truth. The balancing of that, of truth and discretion, has been tough.”
For information on La Dolce Italia Festival and for bookings, visit ladolceitalia.com.au.
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