Alec Baldwin denies pulling trigger in 'Rust' shooting

[localroger]

32. This is just not how it works

Is it an actor's responsibility to know explosives, electronics, chemistry, and every other discipline the character they are playing might know? That simply isn't possible and it's been recognized for a century. For all of those things there are people on the set who are responsible. Actors aren't the ones who are responsible. If they were, nobody in their right mind would take up acting as a career, because a movie set is chaos incarnate (I've been on one) and it simply isn't possible to keep track of everything while you are also trying to stay in character. Anything that might be dangerous, and lots of stuff that isn't like continuity stuff, has responsible staff who are keeping track of it. That is not and can't be an actor's job. An actor's job is to do what the director says with the stuff the other staff have arranged on the set. Sometimes one of those things is a gun, and it's no different. That's why "armorer" is a whole job description in the movie industry. It's the armorer, not the actor, who is responsible for all the gun safety stuff. And the armorer for Rust has a bit of explaining to do.