In a new interview with Hoda Kotb on TODAY, Matt Hutchins, the husband of slain cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, called out actor Alec Baldwin over the death of his wife on the set of Rust, while also blaming “industry standards that were not practiced.” Hutchins is currently suing Baldwin and many involved in Rust‘s production over Halyna’s death, blaming “reckless behavior and cutting costs.” Baldwin denied any culpability despite being the one holding the gun that discharged, a fact that frustrated Hutchins.
“The idea that the person holding the gun and causing it to discharge is not responsible is absurd to me,” Hutchins said in the interview, that will air in full on Thursday. “But gun safety was not the only problem on that set. There were a number of industry standards that were not practiced and there’s multiple responsible parties.”
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Hutchins also expressed anger over Baldwin’s ABC interview about the incident. “Watching him I just felt so angry,” Hutchins told Kotb. “I was just so angry to see him talk about her death so publicly in such a detailed way and then to not accept any responsibility after having just described killing her.”
Baldwin was holding the gun when It went off but has maintained that he never pulled the trigger. “I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them, never,” Baldwin told Geroge Stephanopoulos for ABC News. “Someone put a live bullet in a gun, a bullet that wasn’t even supposed to be on the property.” He said he had no reason to believe a live bullet would be in the prop gun.
According to TMZ, lawyers for Hutchins’ husband and son filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Baldwin and others from the film’s crew claiming Baldwin intentionally pulled the gun from its holster and pointed it in Hutchins’ direction. “He released the revolver’s hammer, and — BAM — defendant Baldwin fired the revolver,” the suit reads. In addition to Baldwin, other defendants in the suit include Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed and assistant director, David Halls. The suit also names multiple production companies, as well as the company that provided the ammunition. In the lawsuit, Hutchins’ family claims that cost-cutting methods — including hiring inexperienced armorers and requiring the armorer to also handle the duties of assistant props master — led to “super unsafe” conditions, as alleged by a camera operator who made safety complaints just days before Hutchins’ death.
This is not the first lawsuit to emerge in the wake of Hutchins’ death. Rust medic Cherlyn Schaefer previously filed a lawsuit against Gutierrez-Reed and Halls, as well as the film’s production company and other individuals. Schaefer claims that alleged negligence on part of the defendants caused her to experience severe emotional distress in the aftermath of the shooting.
Hutchins was killed on the set of Rust on Oct. 21, after a prop gun that Baldwin was holding, discharged. The gun was initially not believed to be loaded with live rounds. In addition to Hutchins’ death, the incident also wounded the film’s director, Joel Souza. Following the incident, Baldwin released a statement on Twitter, and later he spoke to a group of photographers who were inquiring about the incident. “A woman died,” he told the group, per Deadline. “She was my friend. She was my friend. The day I arrived in Santa Fe to start shooting, I took her to dinner with Joel, the director. We were a very, very well-oiled crew shooting a film together and then this horrible event happened.”
