Nicolas Cage Weighs in on Alec Baldwin’s ‘Rust’ Shooting

Nicolas Cage weighed in on the recent tragedy on the Rust film set and offered his opinion on Alec Baldwin‘s involvement. In the latest Actor Roundtable for The Hollywood Reporter, the Pig actor sat down with other awards contenders Peter Dinklage, Andrew Garfield, Jonathan Majors, and Simon Rex to discuss their careers and the state of Hollywood today. The that resulted in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins came up, and Cage, who has been In the business for decades, gave his take.

Cage emphasized the importance of actors taking the time to learn about gun safety If they are required to handle them on set. “I don’t want to cast blame anywhere, but I do think, and I’m not talking about anybody, but people don’t like the word movie star. We want to be humble actors. But a movie star is a bit of a different kind of presentation because you need to know how to ride a horse,” Cage explained. “You need to know how to fight. You’re going to do fight scenes. You need to know how to ride a motorcycle. You need to know how to use a stick shift and drive sports cars, and you do need to know how to use a gun. You do. You need to take the time to know what the procedure is. Those are part of the job profiles.”

Cage also emphasized the importance of stuntmen. “Now, the stuntman and the movie star are two jobs that co-exist, they co-exist,” Cage said. “Every stuntman needs to be a movie star and every movie star needs to be a stuntman. That’s just part of the profile… And that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

Baldwin was holding the real gun when It went off, but was lead to believe that it was loaded with dummy rounds. Baldwin also maintains that he has handled guns on multiple films sets and felt confident that he could do it safely. “I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them, never,” Baldwin told George Stephanopoulos in an interview for ABC News. “Someone put a live bullet in a gun, a bullet that wasn’t even supposed to be on the property.”

Dinklage also pointed out the responsibility of the Hollywood community to ensure that this sort of accident never happens again. “It can be avoided because look at what you can do with movies,” Dinklage said. “You know that also calls into question, are there too many guns in movies? We’ve all held guns in movies, probably, and I always think about that being anti-gun myself, but the character isn’t. That’s a very complicated thing. But that made it very clear that there has to be change, like, now. One hundred percent.”