Alec Baldwin Quits Twitter After Gillian Anderson Accent Joke Backfires

Alec Baldwin has quit Twitter for the second time this year. After briefly leaving the platform in January amid wife Hilaria Baldwin’s Spanish heritage controversy, the actor announced Wednesday that he deactivated his account because of the “a—holes” who criticized his tweet referring to Gillian Anderson “switching accents.”

The backlash was prompted earlier in the day after Baldwin took to the social media platform to share a CNN report about Anderson’s Golden Globe win for Netflix’s The Crown, the historical drama about Queen Elizabeth’s reign on which she portrayed former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Anderson, who split time growing up between the U.S. and U.K., used an American accent while accepting her Sunday win and was quoted in the article as saying she “tried hard to cling on to my British accent” when her family moved from England back to the “U.S.” Baldwin shared the article with the caption, “Switching accents? That sounds… fascinating.”

Not long after, Baldwin took to Instagram to share a 10-minute-long video, in which he announced, “I deactivated my Twitter account today.” While the actor did not name Anderson by name, explaining that he didn’t “want to drag other people into my debates,” he referenced the tweet and cited “haters” who did not understand the “irony” behind his comment for his decision to leave the platform.

“And of course you can’t do any irony on Twitter, you can’t do irony in the United States anymore because the United States is such an uptight, stressed-out place and such an unpleasant place right now,” he said, adding that he is a “huge fan” of Anderson and that his tweet “was meant to just illustrate the point that multicultural expressions of anyone… that’s your business… But I find that, of course, on Twitter, which is where all the a—holes in the United States and beyond go to get their advanced degrees in a–hole-iness, that I had used it as a news aggregator, and I suppose I will do my best to find other places that are similar in their news aggregation in real-time and periodicals I like.”

Baldwin ended his video on a happier note, expressing his excitement at the newest addition to his family – daughter Lucia. He and Hilaria recently welcomed their sixth child via surrogate, with Baldwin stating that having children has been “the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.”