The volatile, charming actor may be enjoying a new lease of life in the TV sitcom 30 Rock but ELIZABETH DAY meets a man disillusioned by showbiz and bruised by family troubles. Now 50, Baldwin insists that it's time for a change. Could that mean a career in politics?
KEY POINTS:
Alec Baldwin is so effortlessly charming that you almost expect him to be carrying a briefcase full of vacuum cleaner parts to assemble and demonstrate. He has perfected the salesman's patter, the direct eye contact, the firm but respectful handshake. "I like charming people," he says. "I think it's the only talent I have."
This seems overly modest. During a career in film spanning more than 20 years, Baldwin has consistently turned in powerfully crafted performances in box-office hits such as Glengarry Glen Ross, The Hunt for Red October and Martin Scorsese's The Departed, achieving movie-star status without ever losing credibility as a dramatic actor.
Then, in 2006, having reached an age where most of the movie roles on offer were becoming "characterful" (for which, read older and fatter), he discovered a hitherto unexploited gift for comedy. Saturday Night Live comedienne Tina Fey offered him a role as the whimsically disquieting studio executive Jack Donaghy in her new sitcom, 30 Rock. Within a year the role had won Baldwin a Golden Globe and a considerable cult following.
Now he sits straight-backed, legs apart, hands on his knees, exuding all the masculine confidence of a 1950s matinee idol. It is infuriating, this charm, because there is much about the 50-year-old Baldwin that is deeply uncharming and yet it's difficult to dislike him. He has a reputation for having a ferocious temper, lashing out at the occasional paparazzo and giving way to road-rage. In Hollywood-speak, he has "anger-management issues". Professionally, this has mostly served him well. Baldwin fleshes out his acting roles with an undercurrent of menace and physicality. Even his comedic turns - as Jack Donaghy or cameos in Friends and Will & Grace- are notable for their unsettling edge ("You have the boldness of a much younger woman," he tells the Tina Fey character in 30 Rock, with lethal precision). On screen, you never quite know what Baldwin is thinking; he teeters on the brink of rage or hilarity.
In other areas his temper has done him no favours. The actress Jan Maxwell, his co-star in a 2006 off-Broadway play, quit the production because of Baldwin's flare-ups, which allegedly included him punching his fist through a wall because the theatre was "too hot".
Then there was the incident in April 2007 when an angry telephone message that Baldwin left his 11-year-old daughter Ireland was leaked to the media. Baldwin was going through a bitter custody battle with ex-wife Kim Basinger, and had been allotted specific slots for phone calls. When Ireland failed to answer at a scheduled time, Baldwin let rip, calling her a "thoughtless little pig" and threatening to "straighten [her] ass out".
In terms of successful parenting discipline, it was hardly Dr Spock.
And yet here Baldwin is, perched on a stool in the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles, smiling his Cupid's bow smile and benignly sipping an iced coffee. Is it safe to ask him why he gets so furious? He looks at me, unsmiling, for several seconds.
"Well if you have four bad days in four straight years, then all four of them are depicted in the media, then yeah. The other 360 days of the year, when you're just handing out lollipops and riding unicorns through cotton-candy forests and everything's so magical, they don't report that.
"When you tell the cab driver to go f*** himself, that's who you are that year. The media takes you on your worst day and says: `that's who you are as a person'."
He says his relationship with Ireland, now 12, is "great", despite the ongoing custody battle. His 2002 divorce, after nine years of turbulent marriage, attained such heights of nastiness that it was described by one gossip website as "the most disturbing news since Lenin and Trotsky split".
Basinger accused Baldwin of being "emotionally and physically abusive".
Baldwin retaliated by saying Basinger reached "an almost sexual level of satisfaction when in a room full of high-priced lawyers". At least Baldwin's insults were funnier.
He remains unrepentant about the phone call, and, although is careful not to say so, it is clear he believes his ex-wife leaked the tape to the press - an allegation that Basinger has denied. "I'm sure that most people, when they look at who benefits from releasing that tape, can imagine who released it," Baldwin says. "Everyone I know who has children has had their - to varying degrees - pretty ugly contretemps. I never used one word of vulgarity, nor did I ever threaten my kid.
"My message was left for my daughter under the presumption of privacy. It was unimaginable to think someone would release it in that way."
Later this year he is publishing an uplifting book on the subject of "parental alienation" entitled A Promise to Ourselves: Fatherhood, Divorce and Family Law. For all his bravado, it is clear that Baldwin was left bruised by the public fracas. He is not the type of man to admit being wrong but I think he privately acknowledges his failings and wants to compensate for them. Despite a hatred for Los Angeles, he splits his time between that city, where Ireland lives with Basinger, and New York, where 30 Rock is filmed. He mentions his daughter often, and the effect is more touching than defensive.
After the volatility of recent years, he says he misses romance, although he has such a dry sense of humour, it's difficult to tell when he's joking. Does he believe in love and marriage?
"Oh yeah, I do. I've been single for seven years and as I get older, I think, all I want is to be loved. The world becomes a place where you think, let everyone else have it. Let them all fight over jobs and money. You work in this business for 25, almost 30 years, and when you get to my age the focus shifts discernibly. You want other things. You want things in life that are lovely."
Later, when I ask him to come up with a catchphrase that best defines his life, he lapses into a prolonged silence. I think at first that he's attempting to construct a wisecracking one-liner but instead he simply says: "Time for a change."
"I've done this now for a long time and I've enjoyed it, and the TV show is the greatest job I've ever had. But I just feel like there's other things I want to do. I'm tired. The business has changed. It used to have a nice mix of the snack food and the more haute cuisine fare. Now in the entertainment world it's all potato chips. Even the greatest actors in our generation are struggling to get their hands on that script, on that director. It's very rare now.
"You turn around one day, like me - I'm 50 and I don't want to work as much. I used to be all about work and now I'm burnt out - I really don't like working."
When he mentions that he wants to take up yoga and "be a bit more conscious everyday", he sounds like he's embracing a stonking mid-life crisis. Superficially, he ticks all the boxes. His flesh has spread outwards, blurring the edges of his angled good looks. Today he is wearing a dark suit, open at the jacket and straining at the trousers.
His fingers resemble cocktail sausages and his hair is slicked with too much gel. Under the table, there's a man bag that looks like a neoprene shopping basket.
Yet he manages to carry it all off with disarming panache. The extra weight suits him. He possesses a sense of moody introspection and quiet edginess that I suspect means women will forever giggle coquettishly in his presence. And men, too: after the publication in 1998 of Alec Baldwin Doesn't Love Me and Other Trials from My Queer Life by Michael Thomas Ford, he attracted quite a gay following. "Am I a gay icon?" he asks, bemused. "I used to be when I was younger."
Having reached his half-century, Baldwin is obviously looking for a change of direction and, as a lifelong Democrat, he makes no secret of his desire to go into politics "one day". He has been following the 2008 election campaign and is a regular blogger on the subject for the Huffington Post website.
"Could a black man win? Yes," he says, on the subject of Barack Obama.
"Could a black man with a Muslim name? The US has been run for years by men with names like Johnson, Ford, Reagan, Clinton - there's an Anglo tilt.
"This country needs a change but I'm not sure if a man named Obama can get it; it's like marketing, like buying laundry soap, soda or corn chips. Will they buy McCain or Obama? What sounds right? A critical mass of Americans don't think beyond that. They do indeed choose presidents like they do laundry soap."
Baldwin takes umbrage when I compare him to actor-turned-politician, Arnold Schwarzenegger. "I'm sick and tired of everybody saying what a great guy he is. For me, his election as governor was offensive."
If Baldwin went into politics, would he come clean about the skeletons in his closet? He grins. "I would, but only in the sense that I would say to people: assume I've done everything. Assume I've had sex with animals, imbibed every kind of drink, poured absinthe on my cornflakes. I've done every debauched, filthy, insidious ... everything. Just assume that for the argument, and now - next question.
LOWDOWN
Born: 3 April 1958 in New York to Alexander Rae Baldwin, an American football coach, and Carolyn Newcomb, a history teacher.
Career: 1980 - Receives his first major screen role on daytime soap opera The Doctors; 1986 - Makes his film debut with a minor part in romantic comedy She's Having a Baby; 1990 - Establishes himself in the A-list of Hollywood stars, playing Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October; 2003 - Receives an Oscar nomination for his role as Las Vegas casino boss in gambling drama The Cooler; 2006 - Takes the part of studio executive Jack Donaghy in Tina Fey's satire 30 Rock, winning a Golden Globe for the role.
Personal life: 1993: Marries actress Kim Basinger, whom he met on the set of The Marrying Man in 1991. They divorce in 2002, prompting a custody row over daughter Ireland.
Where and when: 30 Rock on C4, Weds 8pm.
