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The actor Alec Baldwin has spent a lot of time at life’s intersections. He came of age with challenging circumstances on one side and larger-than-life role models on the other. And when you look at how he works or how he parents (he’s now a father of eight), you’ll see that the duality has stuck around. He and I talk about how it’s possible to feel regret and gratitude in one breath, the specific things he’s learned from writing, and how much more we both hope to gain in the years ahead. It’s a personal conversation, and it feels necessary — though we both hesitate to use the word “therapeutic.” Let’s leave that to the experts.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

David Duchovny, Alec Baldwin

David Duchovny  00:06

I’m David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Alec Baldwin is an actor. He’s a writer. He’s a philanthropist. From the stage to the screen, he has been a fixture for the past few decades, racking up Emmys and Golden Globes all sorts of other awards along the way. He started out in soap operas, eventually became a leading man in the 80s and 90s, and hit films like Beetlejuice and Glengarry Glen Ross later on, he found himself beginning to play more comedic and character actor roles, including his time as Jack Donaghy on 30 rock with Tina Fey. He’s also hosted Saturday Night Live a record 17 times. In general, though he’s been out of the spotlight recently in the aftermath of the incident on the set of rust earlier this year, the involuntary manslaughter case against Alec was dismissed. We talked about this a little in the interview. Alec knows a thing or two about podcasting, since he’s also been a podcast host Since 2011 so he was in the game way ahead of most everybody else on his show called here’s the thing, he’s completed well over 100 interviews. So it’s likely that some of that comes across during our conversation, little cross examination, but at least in theory, I’m the host, and here’s my conversation with Alec Baldwin.

 

David Duchovny  01:31

There he is. Hey, good morning.

 

Alec Baldwin  01:34

You look like David Duchovny,

 

David Duchovny  01:40

Alec, you know when I when I’m gonna do a conversation, when I’m looking forward to having a conversation? I don’t know about you, with your interviewing skills, and obviously you’ve thought a lot about being on both sides of this chair, I was really taken, Alec, I have to say with with your memoir, which is already seven years old. So if you’re looking to shut the door and write, I imagine you have some material, you have seven years of material to come back to, and.

 

Alec Baldwin  02:17

Have you written a memoir? Did you write one?

 

David Duchovny  02:19

No.

 

Alec Baldwin  02:20

Yeah, it should. It’s really so I don’t like the word therapeutic, but it just is a great experience, because when I did it, if I did it again, I wouldn’t be as like the publisher. I said, give me a female editor. I want a female editor to Why did you say that? I thought it was going to be a better balance for me, because I had a guy once, and he was okay, you know, he was okay, but he seemed to be kind of channeling his opinions of me and not my writing, into the work we did. So I was kind of, like, not comfortable with that, but yeah, the I had a female writer on the memoir, and she was very young, so I think the cultural references and that kind of things, to some degree, just bounced off her. And, I mean, I wouldn’t, I don’t think I’d read another memoir or a sequel to that, although I’d like to, because this latter part of my life, getting married and having all these kids and some of the things I’ve been going through are very, you know, rich with material.

 

David Duchovny  03:21

Absolutely, and I think that you’re a writer, my sense is that you’re not rewritten very much. And it is a style, you know, it was, it did not seem like it was generated by an early version of AI, which would you call a ghost writer?

 

Alec Baldwin  03:38

My next one’s gonna be pure AI. Actually, I’ll be napping while the computer.

 

David Duchovny  03:42

Exactly.

 

Alec Baldwin  03:44

But the thing is, my brother Stephen, who has been very heavily involved in his evangelical work. He’s a, you know, evangelical Christian, and a guy he worked with who did this, he wrote books with people he was the CO writer, or ghost writer, what have you. His name is Mark Tab. And Mark Tab is somebody who I just love. This guy. He’s the most lovely man you’ve ever met. He and his wife and their three daughters. I got to be friends with them because he was my writer. With me on the book on the divorce book that I wrote, and mark another memo I did on my own, but I remembered many of the suggestions he gave me, like really looking for the paragraph, bake, break, the sentence, break. He’d say to me in my divorce book, he’d say this, you’re a little too mean to your ex wife. You’re not, you’re not, you’re not honest enough. And he would really pick spots, not a lot. He was very unintrusive. But when I wrote the book, which is called a promise to ourselves about fatherhood and divorce. Mark wrote, he wrote one whole chapter on the dynamics of parental alienation, as is discussed through Richard Gardner’s work. And their gardener was the guru there. But long story short. Don’t I don’t mean to ramble, is it Mark? Mark taught me a lot. It was really very helpful.

 

David Duchovny  05:06

He taught you a lot about structure, about the structure with yourself.

 

Alec Baldwin  05:09

Yeah, structure.

 

David Duchovny  05:12

I have not written a memoir. I’ve I write novels. I’m more comfortable doing that. I mean, I, in some ways, I’m very I’m very impressed by your courage to go out under your own name, you know, to write under your own name. In that way, the divorce book as well, which, since you brought it up, I’d love to touch on that, because it is something I found formative as a person, my parents divorce and then something that I dreaded putting my own kids through, because my parents divorce was so hideous in many ways.

 

Alec Baldwin  05:54

How old were you when they got divorced? I was 11.

 

David Duchovny  05:58

Okay, yeah. I mean, there’s you say in your book, divorce is child abuse, which I found, you know, it’s a lightning bolt of a statement, right? It’s, it’s meant to shock that. And I wonder if you could unpack that a little for me, and in this case, it also touches very much on issues of masculinity and what it is to be a man, what it is to be a father, what it is to be a husband, which I think is a very stark concern of yours as it is of mine. You know, in our generation at this, at this point in time.

 

Alec Baldwin  06:32

Well, I would say that when I wrote that book, in an ocean of thoughts and difficulties, you know, a handful stand out, and the one that seems to stand up the most, this one therapist who I really liked her a lot. She was very helpful, and she said to me, your child is a hostage, and she cannot communicate with you even if she wanted to, and she hopes you’ll understand that was her tail line, she hopes. And I just that just broke me. It just shattered me that my kid, it didn’t really matter what she wanted to do or didn’t want to do, she wasn’t allowed to do anything. You know, my ex wife was my ex wife was like, I’m done with you. She’s done with you. So that changed me in a lot of ways. I was so changed from that experience. I think that, I think that, you know, I grew up in a family where my father was a school teacher in a public high school. Yeah, my mom was a stay at home mom, but instead, everybody got a little older. She went back to work at a small marketing research firm that used to work on the floor of a mall in our town. And she was this person help running that whole project. And Massapequa, right? Massapequa, yeah, and my father, you know, he didn’t other kids in our neighborhood, their parents had things they could withhold from their children in order to control them. I’m not giving you any money for gas in the boat this weekend, your friends can’t come over to your finished basement and play ping pong and pool. You didn’t have a boat. We didn’t have any of those things, and my father only had the fear program. Yeah. What time are you coming home? 10:30 and he just look at you like you come home at 1030 and we were terrified of my father. He was a big, tough guy. Yeah, and we can’t help. My wife has always helped me to try to evolve though this, but develop this, but we carry with us some of our own childhood and our own and those parenting skills we witnessed, right? And sometimes I look at my kids like, I’m gonna throw you right off the roof of this building if you don’t stop. And my wife has taught me just don’t say that. Look like you’re gonna do it, but don’t say so I’ve gotten really good. I mean, we don’t. My wife and I have a very the kids do what the kids are normal. They disturb, they they punch the crap out of each other for 15 minutes a day, and then everything’s peaceful. But, um, like in my home, but, but, but also, it’s interesting in my family, how the oldest three children who saw my parents, we have six children in our family, the oldest three children, my sister Beth myself, my brother, Daniel, all of us are divorced, and all of us knew our parents during the good times when we were little, our child and when we were little was buchalic. You know, my father would take us to the beach. He was happy. My parents were happy, and this was till I was about 10, because when my father’s mother died. He changed. My father’s mother died unexpectedly. She fell down a flight of stairs in a hospital visiting her husband. My father’s father, he was having a cardiac procedure, and she fell and cracked her head open and died, that is, and no, it’s beyond belief. It was slippery. It was rainy on the stone steps of this hospital. So she dies, my father was never the same again. Did the father survive? Who was in there? He lives well, they couldn’t tell him for a couple days. He kept saying to my father, Where is your mother? She didn’t show up at the hospital, which wasn’t like her, and they finally had to tell him two three days after his open heart surgery, he died five months later. He died five months later. But my point is, is that my sister, myself, my brother, Daniel, we saw when it was good, and so when we saw when it wasn’t good, we were like, well, we know what this can be. Get out. You don’t even get divorced by younger three siblings, even though they may have had reasons to get divorced, I’m not quite sure they never got divorced. Divorce terrified them. All they saw in their young developmental years was the acrimony and I that really struck me in my own family life.

 

David Duchovny  10:51

For me, yeah, there was terrible acrimony in the divorce. That host that line you quoted from the therapist about a hostage really rang true for me, because I would literally get phone calls from my father and my I would see my mother scurry to the other line. Remember when you had just one line? And you know when your parents are listening in, you hear that that very subtle, and you just know you’re gonna whatever. If you’re talking to a girl, you know how to talk to her now, but if and she would always pick up when I was talking to my dad, so I felt like I was actually a hostage, and I was talking to the person who was trying, who, in my mind, was trying to liberate me. And I can only speak in codes, you know, I can only speak in codes with the old man, and that is the only experience I had with how, how a relationship splits up. So I just never wanted to put my kids through that. And of course, you know, we did it in a way that was, I think, much more humane, but, but the rupture exists. And I think that, you know, when I think of the kind of, not the role model, but the image I had of fathering was kind of empty. Was empty. My father was very different from yours. My father was not a tough guy. He was he was a reader. He was a writer.

 

Alec Baldwin  12:22

What did he do for a living?

 

David Duchovny  12:25

He did many things, but mostly, well, here’s the story. I like my dad. My dad worked at the American Jewish Committee, and he, he, he was like a speech writer. And I guess he called a PR man. He was a public relations man for that business, and that was his nine to five job, but he always identified as a novelist, and so when I was at age 11, he told my mom, and all this is so kind of cliched at this point, but I’m going to go live in the Chelsea Hotel for three months away from the mad house that you understand, we only have three kids. You’ve got, how many running around your house right now so.

 

Alec Baldwin  13:09

I’ve got seven in the house. My old my oldest daughter, Ireland, lives in the Pacific Northwest, so she just had a baby. So I am a father and a grandfather in the same year.

 

David Duchovny  13:19

You’re like a biblical figure.

 

Alec Baldwin  13:21

I political figures had it passed. I’m a biblical character. I’m going to quote you, man, I love that’s perfect. I am a biblical character.

 

David Duchovny  13:31

Yeah, so my dad, he started moving his stuff out of the apartment to go to the Chelsea Hotel, which at that point was still, you know, the mythical Chelsea Hotel was kind of run down, you know, beat up place for Bohemians and artists. And when he came back for the last bag, the last suitcase, that’s when he told my mother that he had met someone and fallen in love and he was going to live with her. And as you can imagine, that was a night to remember, and you know, still very, very emotional for me to recall, you know, from this great remove, a foundational kind of a moment for me as a person, as a son, as a man. And I don’t know where I’m going with this, but to me, that’s what divorce would create. And I remember there was this moment where we had, I guess it was a three bedroom apartment. So there was my parents bedroom, there was a bedroom I had, being the middle child, I was always sharing a bedroom, so I either shared a bedroom with my older brother, then he got too old, he got his own room, and I started sharing with my sister. And I remember peering through the door watching my parents fight at the front door because my mother was actually holding on to my father’s leg, like trying to stop him from walking out the door, right? And I remember catching my brother. His eye, you know, like we’re both kind of peering through this crack in the door, watching our parents in this archetypical kind of conflict. And my dad caught my eye, and he said, Get her off of me will you?

 

Alec Baldwin  15:20

So that I don’t mean to laugh or a snicker here, but want to say, is that, well, let me, let me stop this and just ask you, did you did your mother? Was your mother completely surprised? She didn’t have a sense that he was unhappy and he was because my parents didn’t scream and fight with each other. It was worse, they never talked to each other. For the latter period is never spoke. There was no past each other.

 

David Duchovny  15:44

Yeah, there was not a lot of there was no screaming and fighting that I remember.

 

Alec Baldwin  15:49

Was there a self awareness your mother lacked, that she didn’t understand, that he would say, seemed like an unhappy partner, or?

 

David Duchovny  16:00

It’s, I don’t know, you know, I was too young to ask those questions.

 

Alec Baldwin  16:04

Measure that, yeah.

 

David Duchovny  16:05

And all I knew was that she was broken, you know, and that it was my job to make sure she didn’t break, you know, after that and that and that became a conflicted position to be in, especially as as I got older. I always should be. Go ahead, you’re conflicted, but with respect to women, obviously.

 

Alec Baldwin  16:29

Yeah, well, how it feeds my love life and my mating and coupling people.

 

David Duchovny  16:35

With mating, you’re mating. You can say, think of it.

 

Alec Baldwin  16:38

I stopped mating. Yeah, I don’t think you have I reached into my I had a neurosurgeon turn off the mating switch in my brain. But I want to mention that with me, it became also about it became obsessively about money. So for example, I was a kid, and I would go out and I cut grass and I’d have 40 bucks in my pocket. I was like Rockefeller and the kids of my middle class, working class neighborhood. I come home, my mother was at the kitchen counter crying. Now, I always say, to light this up. It’s I turn it into a Cagney movie. Yeah, I’m Cagney, and I walk in the kitchen. Why are you crying, Ma? What’s the matter? My mother’s like, nothing, nothing. I go, Sure. Ma, tell me, why are you crying over there? And she’d say, I don’t have the money to pay for your sister’s Girl Scout cookies. I spent it. And I go, don’t you worry ahead. Ma, I’ll give you the money for the Girl Scout cookies. I’d reach in my pocket. I said, How much is it? She’d say, $30 here’s your 30. Ma, I got you covered. See, later on, my mother needed a new roof on her house. I’ll build a roof there for you, Ma. I’ll give you the money. And it went on for like decades. Yeah, if I will be your husband, I’ll be your ex husband living in Los Angeles, making money, and I will too. And I say this like now my view of it, I’m being, you know, kind of silly about my view. Now, was okay, great, fine. I was able to do that. Yeah, and my dad, when I started making money, he looked at me one time, and my mother was thumping me for money, and my father goes, you don’t think all this money is just for you, do you? And he was right. I mean, I had an obligation to help people that I would help, but that that whole thing went on for a while, and then eventually it dissipated. But I remember, I remember my mom just really my father would think my father taught American history and economics and contemporary affairs or whatever. Course he’d come home and read, you know the times every day, and he’d read books all the time. He’d be a far he’d be he’d read Foreign Affairs magazine. He’s sitting on the couch reading Foreign Affairs magazine, and he looked up and he goes, your mother’s in the other room reading Harold Robbins. That’s the difference between me and your mother. We just have grown to where I’m trying to deepen this part of my life, because my father went to a year of law school, then dropped out because he had to raise his kids. But anyway, you were going to say no.

 

David Duchovny  19:09

That is all extremely, I mean, we have, we have a very shared kind of background, time frame, geographical, you know, Locus, you and I, and the money thing struck me. You know, you, you come out straight in the in the memoir, and you say, I’m writing this for money. Most of the acting jobs I’ve done it for money. And, yeah, it was more than refreshing. It’s also very interesting, because just in terms of, like, taking an acting job for money, okay, that could be the reason I have also done that, because I come from the same place. There was no money. My mother grew up in the depression in Scotland, which was. Worse than it was here, my God. And she the phrase that we always heard was, you know, and for me it was, I have to get an education. I have to go go to an Ivy League school. I have to get a scholarship, otherwise I’ll end up in the gutter. That was, where’d you go? Harvard, Columbia. I went to Princeton. Went to bro. You went to Princeton? Yeah, but I went to collegiate. I got a scholarship to go to collegiate, which was fast tracking me into the Ivies. You know, it was all my mother’s kind of, kind of a plan. It wasn’t about wealth for my mother. My mother hated rich people with a passion, like most, you know, lower middle class, lower class people, especially in Great Britain, you know, she just had a great mistrust of them. And in fact, I tried to get into collegiate when I was in second grade, and they didn’t take me. And that was the year they took JFK Jr, and that just gave my mother another vendetta against, you know, the rich, you know, they, they gave your spot to JFK, those bastards, you know, yeah, but I was going to be her event, her retribution on the world. You know, that I was going to achieve, I was going to leave all these rich fucking kids in my dust. That was the idea. And money wasn’t a part of it. You know, our mothers were my mother needed money to live and to raise her kids, but there wasn’t, there wasn’t anything for else for Her that money could buy. It was just survival.

 

Alec Baldwin  21:51

You above most people, I would say, because I’m not saying this just to be polite. I’m always intrigued, of course, by the people that go back to school, the Jodie fosters and them who go back, Brooke Shields, they go back. Brooke went to prophecy of Princeton. Who go back and get these degrees because I went back to school. I graduated in 80 but they wouldn’t transfer all my credits from GW to NYU. I changed majors to go into theater, which was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

 

David Duchovny  22:18

And then I can’t let, I can’t let that go by.

 

Alec Baldwin  22:22

We’re going to talk about this. But my point is, is that everybody in the business knows how smart you are. They know your background. So just explain to me why someone of that background who’s ready, you know, put Princeton with Yale and Harvard in terms of the business community. Princeton’s a big business people school. You’re going to walk into some big job. Why do you go into acting what happened that you made that fork in the road? Why? Because I regret it. But you go ahead.

 

David Duchovny  22:49

I don’t think you regret it. Alec.

 

Alec Baldwin  22:51

Well, I’ll tell you, but go ahead.

 

David Duchovny  22:57

There’s, as you know, there’s a number of answers to that, right? And one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, and I will answer your question, is I read this great I read this great interview with Joyce Carlo recently, and she said I was asked this question, and I gave an answer because I was asked the question, but I have never really thought about that particular subject that I was asked about. And then I realized I don’t know that I believe what I said, and that I want the ability to say, in three or four days, I’ve changed my mind. I no longer actually feel that way. You asked me something, and I answered off the cuff, and that was the moment. It was a momentary truth for me, but it’s not the eternal truth for me. It’s not it didn’t even last two or three days. It was just my response. And I think I thought of you thinking about that too, because I feel like you are somebody that likes to respond in the moment. You know likes, like, you enjoy, you enjoy your own mind.

 

Alec Baldwin  24:04

That’s a t shirt I’m gonna buy for myself. I like to respond in the moment.

 

David Duchovny  24:08

You enjoy your mind being challenged and standing on the precipice of I’m not sure if this is gonna fucking read, but here it comes, and that’s cool, and I appreciate the bravery So to go back all that to say that whatever answer I’m going to give you now is today. You know, it could be a different one tomorrow. Yep, but the the vectors that go into that answer are a I was never taught to care about money, even though we didn’t have any. As I said, both my parents actually, not just my mother, my father, too, had no respect for just the accumulation of money. Had no respect. We’re not fooled by people that had money as as we are. You know, in this day and age, as we watch, you know, Elon Musk, we’re not fooled into. Thinking that money gave you any kind of character attribute that was worthwhile, so I didn’t have that. One might call it a luxury at this point. You know, even though we didn’t have money, I had the luxury of seeing through it, or I was given that by my parents. So there was never a sense in which I’m going to major in economics and go get a job, you know, with Lehman Brothers or whatever. I it just wasn’t in me. My dad, as I said, identified himself as an artist. My mother was a school teacher like your dad. For me, aside from that, I considered myself a creative person, as an artist and as a writer like my dad, and yet I didn’t have the discipline yet to sit down and shut the door and just write, nor the compulsion to have to write every day. And the third part of that answer would be I had spent the first 20 years of my life cultivating my intellect by dint of having the parents that I had and going to the schools that I went to. And somehow, when I stumbled into acting class, and I stumbled into acting class with Marcia, how frecked […]

 

Alec Baldwin  26:14

Great is that you and I have things in common. Jill, my teacher. She was my teacher.

 

David Duchovny  26:19

I know, when I saw that word, when I saw that name in your book, I was like, Oh, my God. And when I stumbled into Marsha’s class, I felt, oh, there’s an entire side of me that is, that is atrophying here. Here I walked into this class where I could scream and yell and nobody would get hurt, you know, but I could exercise and exorcize my feelings. So this was, it was heaven to me, and then they start to pay you for it, and it’s like, oh, fuck, now I’m trapped. Now you’re trapped. So I think that’s part of why you say I regret it, but I’d rather hear you, you know, speak on that.

 

Alec Baldwin  27:03

Well, no, I always feel like the studios have a very precise manual, and the manuals are all labeled like, one says directors, one says or screenwriters, the other manual on the shelf says actors, and in that manual is a tried and true, well proven compilation of plans of how you deal with these people. And one thing they say about actors is the first thing you do is get them hooked on money. These are people that many of these people, they never dreamed in a million years they would be where they are. They never dreamed in a million years they’d make this much money doing this because, as I always tell people, acting, I said, it’s hard. Sometimes, sometimes it’s not hard. What’s hard is, I said, when it’s good, it’s hard in two different ways, when it’s really good and challenging, that’s hard because you want to do, well, you want, man, I wish to drive. When the earliest acting I did, I drive home. I was living in Venice, and I drive home from a Sony or whatever, and I and I remember, I get to, like, one certain intersection, and I go, shit. That’s how I should have said that. Sure, yeah. So it’s all that rear view mirror acting. It was a bit of that, and the challenge of doing it well, because when I did a soap opera, the first job I had in New York was a soap. It was like six months into it, where I could literally set myself down. I go. Now, this isn’t as easy as I thought it was. That’s really there’s something to it. And then the second way that it’s hard is when the material sucks and everything around you is kind of, you feel like you’re at one big audition. You know, you’re auditioning all these other actors or something, where you just the materials week, the directors week, what have you, but I say it’s hard and it’s challenging, but everything else that comes with it is really can be very painful. And in my own case, it’s been kind of, especially lately, it’s been extraordinarily painful. And the, you know, I look at you, and again, I’m not saying these things to be polite. And you, you seem like somebody you could have been a great therapist. You know, you’re very intuitive, and you and you articulate so muscularly the things that you want to say, you could have been a great therapist. Could have been a great lawyer. You and I could have had a law firm together. We would have made so much money. Would be fucking insane. You know what I mean?

 

David Duchovny  29:13

And it’s the beginning of your of your book, where you say, you know, Monday, I was gonna own an art on art gallery. Tuesday, I was gonna deal in antique clocks. Wednesday, I was gonna be a teacher and, and, you know, obviously an actor gets to be all those things, you know. So there’s, there’s that kind of wish fulfillment, or, you know, inability to choose, or, you know, I’ve thought of myself from time to time is either a dilettante, you know, on the on the on the plus side. You know, call me a Renaissance Man that feels good, or you can call me a dilettante that doesn’t feel as good. But I think we share an inability to go all in to one mode of expression. And if I’m to play a. Armchair psychologist. I don’t really like to do this because it’s kind of bullshitty, but I’ll do it for a second. I see you as a person. You know you, you want to make a difference. You want to be that fucking Teddy Roosevelt quote that I hate, because everybody uses it, but you want to be the man in the arena. You. You like that feeling of agency. An actor, by definition, has zero agency. You’re just playing you’re playing at being people that have agency, act against it. So that dichotomy for you, once you got into it and and had great success at it, I’m sure, was, you know, because you had success at it, some people that don’t get the success they want, they’re lucky in a way, because they don’t have to face the fact that it doesn’t really work. You know, this thing that you thought was going to fix you or give you, give you this perfect life.

 

Alec Baldwin  30:53

Don’t tell you when it did. I’ll tell you what it did fix me was maybe not fix me, but I’ll tell you when things started to change a little bit, and that was for me, not all of it. I mean, a lot of it had to do with money and earning a living and taking care of certain people. And had a lot of people counting on me during the 90s, when I was lighting one off another, I just was a chain shooter. You know, I just would shoot films all those 10 years. But, you know, I’m sitting probably one of the big jobs I got that helped me was I did this TV series, Knots Landing for a CBS, which was a huge hit, was a juggernaut in that, you know, Dallas, that’s before the 80s. Yeah, this is in the 80s, and they bring me on the show to be a cast division, and the show is already a hit. So I’ve been given this really great thing on a silver platter. I’m stepping onto the set of a TV show that already has 23 million people watching it every week, back when those ratings were real for network TV. And I go in there and I’m gonna play Julie Harris’s son. I was asked to do a movie which was a great movie. I’m not exactly this was a great and I only like to talk about I’ve grown so I’ve grown so I’ve grown so kind of repulsed by actors talking about the movies they were gonna make on that one, yeah, I’m like, don’t say it. I mean, I have so many jobs like that, like, I’m never gonna tell you, but I go in to do this, I go in to do a movie, and I’ll never forget, I’m in New York. It’s cold. The director is gonna meet me with the casting people. That came in from LA and I literally was so nervous. I go in and I bang down two big shots of whiskey in a bar around the corner, and I’m like, Okay, I’m ready. What can I nail? And I get the job. I get it. I’m gonna do this TV movie. My agent says the TV movie is gonna be on once, one repeat. That’s all they get. And you’re going to be seen by a lot of people. He goes, but you’ve been asked to do this TV series. And blah, blah, blah, not slanting, and, and the and the button is, he says in, your mother is Julie Harris. So my point is to shorten this as I be on the set, and I be sitting in Julie’s dressing room. And this began the the real delight, the real cascade of the great people I worked with, yeah, and that’s what got me high and I’m there with Julie, and she’s Julie Harris. At that point, she won the most Tony Awards for Best Actress on Broadway five. She was eclipsed by Angela Lansbury and Audra McDonald, and Audra is about to win her seventh or eighth and become the all time title holder. But Julie, I said, in your career, the things you’ve done, what’s the thing that’s most memorable, or among, I always say among the most memorable has a long pause, and she was like a child, and she looked up and she goes, Well, I’m one of only two women to have kissed Jimmy Dean in a movie. And I’m going, you won five Tony Awards. And the thing your proudest stuff was that you made up with Jimmy Dean, and she was a woman. She’s a woman. And I remember all going on in my career, the people I worked with, the people I worked with the Connery and just name all of them all the way down, yeah. And I was like, this is fun. This is fun. And acting is fun if the material is good. But that was like, maybe the case half the time at best. But yeah, I just think a lot of, I think a lot as I’m older, that there’s other things that could have done.

 

David Duchovny  34:17

I’ll give you the grace of saying, anybody is going to say that in their life at a certain point, you know, and that that you, I mean, I, I look at your career, I see wonderful work. You are not of your time in the sand. And I realize this through the the memoir, it was interesting to me, you, but through your father, you know, and when you speak your father, I hear the depth of the affection and and the alienation in many ways but the your heroes, our generation, you know our heroes. Acting heroes were Brando Dean, Pacino, then, you know, then Pacino De Niro. Yours were not. Yours were William Holden, you know, Douglas, yours were your dad’s hero.

 

Alec Baldwin  35:15

Yeah, you’re the first person that said that that’s true.

 

David Duchovny  35:19

And but that that affects your style as well. As an actor, you did not come out with the rest of them imitating Brando Pacino De Niro. You came out imitating, not imitating, but, you know, apprenticing yourself to a different style. And I see that.

 

Alec Baldwin  35:40

Oh, that’s very kind of I didn’t know to me. But I don’t renounce. I hate that renunciation factor where someone goes back and says, Oh, I never loved my wife or whatever. You know, everybody was where they wanted to be at the time, you know. And I, and I don’t renounce. I look at movies, I didn’t I go, you know, I say this movie was kind of a waste of time. And where am I to blame? Where could I have done better? You know, and, but the, but a lot of them, I don’t renounce. I had the time of my life to working with Marty, you know, I did the aviator with small role. Then I did the departed. I was around all these guys. I mean, I worship Marty sheen and all these people I met. But I, what I just think about is, as you said, you know, you’ve really opened up my mind here to this idea that you know that not only is there nothing wrong, it’s probably quite healthy to change your mind talking to me tomorrow, and I might have a different answer, which is this, that’s human. And I looked at this, I remember I spoke at the Harvard commencement. I’m at the Harvard Law School commencement, and Martha Minow was the dean of the school, the daughter of Newton Minow, who was the first head of the FCC and coined the phrase vast wasteland about the television tablet.

 

David Duchovny  36:53

Can we pause to respect what an amazing name that Newton Minow is does not get. There’s no better American name than that. Go ahead, I love that.

 

Alec Baldwin  37:05

I’m doing the commencement. We’re standing there. It’s over, and what I said in the commencement was a more fleshed out version of, I wish I was you. I wish I had, if I had my life to do over, I’d be you. You’re walking out of here with a degree from Harvard Law School. Every door is open to you. You have so much opportunity, what a great thing you should be so proud of yourself. I wish if I had my life to do over again, I would do what you did. And when it’s over, Martha Minow walks up to me, goes, would you like to go to Harvard Law School? And of course, I laughed in her face, and I was like, What did you say? And she said, do I keep a couple admissions in my pocket for special circumstances? And I’ll tell you how it works for people like you, and especially of a family, you fly up here on a Tuesday morning. You take your classes all Tuesday afternoon, evening, all Wednesday, all day long, and all Thursday morning into the afternoon. Then you fly home, you come up here. She goes, I’ll have you out of here in two years, if you can do some summers as well. And I said, You’re joking me. And she said, No, but my wife wasn’t enthusiastic about me flying to Boston, to Cambridge, to go to Harvard Law School, but, but the thing is, then something comes that takes you away. It’s like, dating, you know, it’s like,  love, anything that involves love. You’re dating someone, you’re like, Oh, they’re nice, and I like them, and they’re and I’d rather be wrong than lonely, all those kind of thinking. And then then, you know, 30 rock comes around. Yeah, I do that for seven years. That’s like the most, you know, probably one of the three best things that ever happened to me. So we just did, you have to wait for the change to come I suppose.

 

David Duchovny  38:32

You make me think of, you know, going back to my mother again. I didn’t finish my PhD when I graduated Princeton, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I mean, when I was a kid, what I wanted to do was play for the Knicks, and I was a pretty decent basketball player. Don’t laugh so hard.

 

Alec Baldwin  38:48

No, I’m not. It’s normal. I’m smiling. Amazing. That’s great.

 

David Duchovny  38:53

So or for the Yankees. So I loved baseball and basketball. That was really where my heart was playing, playing those games and, you know, acting later to answer your question again, a half an hour later brought me back to being a team player. I loved being on a team and acting on a movie, in a play, on a television show when it’s working. At its best is being on a big team, you know, and that’s a collaborative, yeah, it’s a wonderful feeling. But I I always did feel a certain regret that you’re talking about as an actor, that I had been given these tools, that I was good at, some other thing that I was ignoring or that I was neglecting in my life, and in many ways, you know, going through the divorce and then living alone, and you know, seeing, having my kids like 50% of the time, gave me time not only to think, but to actually become a writer. And when I started to write, and as I as I realized. Is that I had that and that I was honoring the education that I’ve been given, and that I was honoring my own father and mother in many ways, and then I was honoring my own innate talent. That was very satisfying to me, even though I could look at it maybe and say, you know, I regret that I didn’t start writing fiction in my 20s. You know that I waited 35 years, but I did get to it, you know? So if we, if we’re lucky to live long enough, then maybe we can, we can satisfy some other areas that we’ve been neglecting.

 

Alec Baldwin  40:37

Now, you’re I remember, I wrote this in my memoir, which was always probably one of the most vivid things for me, which is unconsciously and unknowingly to some degree, to a vast degree, I tried to turn other men into my father in my life, because I needed help. You know, I look at, I look at De Niro and Scorsese, the brothers, yeah, I look at Scorsese and Leo, his father and son. Yeah, these guys that thrive, I find, are people who they have, they have help, they have a friend. It’s a producer, it’s a writer, someone who really believes in them and goes to the wall for them. And I remember trying to do that, and it’s really hard, because I, you know, I misjudged. I picked people to be my father, who eventually shoved me down a flight of stairs in order to, you know, get where they wanted to go. And I’m always wondering for you, when your dad died, you were how old?

 

David Duchovny  41:24

Oh, I was 40.

 

Alec Baldwin  41:26

And did you need? Did you feel the need to fill a void with that or?

 

David Duchovny  41:30

No, I felt that need beforehand, you know, like, you know, because, because at 11 and 12, you know, there’s, there’s never a good age to lose a father. But I would say 11 and 12, heading into puberty is one of the most dangerous crossings that you can make without a man holding your hand, you know. So, you know, I was just scrambling to survive. I didn’t even think about it. I had trouble. Maybe I had a different version of it from you Alec, and that I have trouble trusting men, I think, because of that, and I wanted to do everything alone. I didn’t want help, you know, I didn’t want a father. In fact, the mythos of my family was we’re going to do it without the guy. You know, we’re going to succeed without a man.

 

David Duchovny  42:50

We’ve only met once. I believe in person, you probably don’t remember. No, twice we’ve met. We’ve met twice in person, I’m sure you don’t remember the first time, it was in Staten Island. I was a glorified extra on Working Girl, yeah, with Mike, the great Mike, yeah, Mike. And it was maybe my first job in a movie, first or second job in a movie. And I just have an image of you. We didn’t meet. I have an image of you hustling to a pay phone, you know, I guess, yeah, I was just on the street, and there you were just on the pay phone.

 

Alec Baldwin  43:31

I think my mother was telling me how much money she needed good.

 

David Duchovny  43:36

The next time, was at an Emmy round table. And this is a bit of, this is a bit of a Hollywood story for you, but it’s going to be mine, and I’ve never, I’ve never told it before, so you’re gonna have to sit through it. I think a little bit, you said something to me that hurt my feelings, and it was not deeply, and I can only say because I had an expert. I wanted you to like me more. So I wanted you to like my work, you know, because I respect your work. And you said, I’ll never work with the company, looking at me, I’ll never work with the company because the company makes too much money, and there won’t be any left for me. And I was like, shit.

 

Alec Baldwin  44:17

That’s just smart David. That’s just being.

 

David Duchovny  44:20

I was like, he doesn’t understand me. That’s what I was thinking, and I’ll always remember that. But here’s the upshoot of that. Of that moment was a few days later, I got a call from Cecilia, who was Gregory pecks, yes, yes, who went to Princeton. I knew her slightly there, and she says, there’s this article out from your Emmy roundtable conversation, and you said something about my father, and my mother is really angry about it. And I said, I what did I say? And she said, you said. That you lost an Emmy to Gregory Peck and he wasn’t even alive. And I said, Oh, well, that’s, it’s, I don’t remember saying that, and it’s, you know, doesn’t sound like me. And it’s, I don’t think that’s funny. And she said, well, my mom is really upset. Can you talk to her? And I said, well, sure. I mean, yeah. And so in the meantime, I asked my publicist, is there a transcript that exists of this conversation? Because I really, not only do I not remember saying it, but it really doesn’t sound like me. Couple days later, I have a phone call to make to.

 

Alec Baldwin  45:39

Veronique.

 

David Duchovny  45:41

You know, yeah. So I, talked to Veronique, and Veronique reams me out, you know, for a good night.

 

Alec Baldwin  45:49

Wow.

 

David Duchovny  45:50

And she’s right, she’s righteous, and she’s got a point. She’s saying, you know, there’s no respect from your generation to you don’t understand, this was a great man. And I was like, yes, I, I guess I was trying to be funny in the moment, you know, it’s that moment again, Alec, where I said something and I thought I was being clever. And, you know, Iunderstand that. It’s, I agree with you, you know, he’s a great actor, and I have no business saying something like that, right? And then it comes back to me, my publicist calls and says it wasn’t you and it wasn’t you either, Alec’s, so you’re off the hook.

 

Alec Baldwin  46:26

I thought you’re gonna tell me it was me.

 

David Duchovny  46:30

I know it was Bryan Cranston.

 

Alec Baldwin  46:32

No.

 

David Duchovny  46:33

Yeah, it was Bryan Cranston. And I call Cecilia and I say, hey, it wasn’t me. I didn’t say that. Can I talk to your mom? You know, I want to, I, you know, because I really, I enjoyed the conversation. She was right, and I agreed with her, and she said, No, she’s kind of over it now. I don’t want to open it up. And I said, well, no, no, no, please.

 

Alec Baldwin  46:57

You tell her it’s not me. At least I have a peck story, and it’s the opposite of that. Actually, it’s kind of the opposite of that. I’m in a voto sante all the time. I’ve been going for you. I know that you’re a pescatarian. I read online, but I’m back in the height of my real vegetarian days. I go to vote Asante. So I go there, and I see Cecilia at a table in the back, and there’s a and there’s a guy next to her with his back to the pen I can’t see. And she waves to me to come over, because I had done this TV movie with her, with Cecilia, and I walk back, and he stands up, and it’s him.

 

David Duchovny  47:31

Yeah, Gregory Pack.

 

Alec Baldwin  47:32

It’s him, and I’m literally on my knees start to shake. I mean, I can’t whenever I meet them, all the scenes start to spool in my everything. But could be this or that, he’s there. It’s the white whale we’re after, and I’m just sitting there looking, I’m going, it’s the white whale, and my knees are shaking. He says, you’ll have to pardon me, I sit with my back to the room for my privacy. And ever since then, ever since that day, I sit with my back to the room for my pride. Never sit facing the dining room of any restaurant. I’m always in the corner, facing into the corner, movie star and actor, Peck movie star and actor, Holden, movie star and actor. So I just love that type of guy. Anyway, I’ll stop sorry.

 

David Duchovny  48:17

Well, yeah, no, don’t apologize the we both, I think, loved Gary Shandling, and, you know, he, he went on that, how do you pronounce the word quixotic quest to to do the the extras for his deep for his show, the DVD extras went on for years. Years, he’s doing this thing that nobody is going to see. And I go to the boxing gym, yeah, well, that’s I got him into boxing there. That’s Bob Dylan’s gym that we’re boxing.

 

Alec Baldwin  48:54

Can you believe that? He tells me, come meet me. We’re going to do this DVD feature for my thing. And what are you going to do? There’s a gym. You’re kind of just going to smack each other around a little bit in this gym, I go, where’s he goes? It’s at Bob Dylan’s office in Santa Monica, yeah, what the fuck are you?

 

David Duchovny  49:07

Fantastic, and I remember listening to that, watching that, and you said something that was not my experience at all. But maybe it’s maybe you want to think about it or talk to me about it, because you said that your experience of going on the Shandling show was, oh, man, these are comedy killers, you know. And I’ve got to, I’ve got a, I’ve got to, you know, bring my shit something.

 

Alec Baldwin  49:37

Yeah, the boxing thing, no, but I’ll tell you what you’re saying is how I like to think of it is when I’ve been around the black belts of comedy. You know, when I walked into work with Tina thay and Robert Carlo, I was terrified first season. I was terrified because they’re funny and I’m not funny. And I always classify this this way, to say a line in a funny way that’s acting to be really funny. You write, Tina writes. Yes, all the stuff on the show. Tina wrote, Riggi wrote all these guys. And so my point is, when I did his show, when I went on there, and obviously I was sleeping with his wife while they were separated, which was so much fun to play. Right when he comes off the show and goes up to rip on the sideline, we’re doing the show, and he comes to the sideline with rip, because what’s going on with you? Rip says, and he says, I just keep seeing him having sex with my wife, and she’s on top. And rip goes, the lazy bastard. And this goes on and on and on, and everybody’s got a lot. And remember when I do those shows when I’m a guest? SNL started this way, for sure. I walk and I go, tell me what you want me to do. This is your show. How do I fit in? So when they told me, for example, someone said to me, you do SNL, and we’re going to send up your career and your attributes, like Schwarzenegger Stallone, and you’re not like that. We don’t mock your style and your persona. So you got to become part of the troupe. You had to pull your pants and just do what everybody else does. And that’s what I did from day one. And they kept inviting me back and inviting me because I think I got it that it wasn’t about, you know, singing some praise of me in some comedic way and with Gary. Then when I went and do the videotape, he was a different get the DVD bonus. He just was a different guy. He was very different, he was a, kind of a more, not feral, not feral, but just very much more armored. Working with Gary on his show was fun. I had a ball. They were cool. He was nice, as can be. Then doing that little thing with him, Gary, I mean, I don’t need to tell you if you were working with him, he changed, and that’s one of the reasons I stopped boxing. I boxed from in 1988 to 1993 and I was 30 to 35 was the best workout I ever had. But eventually I started to get in the ring with people, and I started to get angry because these guys would these guys were smacking me around because I wasn’t that skilled, and so that changed, where I got more skill, but never enough. Then I just turned around. I go, What the fuck am I doing? So I stopped,

 

David Duchovny  52:06

Yeah, wow the the last thing you’re part of an ongoing tragedy. The question is, how do you move now? Like if Gary changed, What? What happens next in your heart, in your soul, in your spirit, in your life?

 

Alec Baldwin  52:38

Well, I think there’s more to come, but the more to come is now my effort, and it’s going to be undeniably a successful effort to raise and to and to expose what really happened. You know, I was counter punching, I was on the defensive. I was being accused. I was being indicted. The mainstream press and the tabloid press suppressed every story that could benefit me and amplified every story that could hurt me. This has been for three years, and the truth of what happened has never been told, never I mean, we have more shit that’s going to come out in ensuing legal filings and so forth that, you know, these last three years, people have just dined out, you know, because in this country, when people hate you on that level, they want three things. They want you to die. The second thing is they want you to go to prison. They want you to go to prison. They love these political crowds, both sides. They love to see their enemies put in prison for years. Because prison is like a living hell. And the third thing is they want you canceled, which is like being in prison or being dead, because you roam the earth and you’re just not you’re invisible. I do believe that, by the communications I’ve had lately, that things are coming back my way to work, and I’m happy for that, because I got seven kids, but I also enjoy the fact that there’s so much of this case that is not known because we didn’t have a full trial. The judge canceled the case. She ruled that it was dismissed with prejudice, which I’m very grateful for, because it was a very, I think, a very, very informed decision on her part. But if I’d gone all the way and gotten a verdict, that’s a little bit better, because a bunch of people in a jury had considered the facts and we would have presented so much more. All that doesn’t get presented because the case is over. In that second week, we had quite a bit. We had troves of things to present that they did which are in line with a lot of other of the horrible things they did. So for me, I’m gonna take a break. I don’t want to talk about this for a while. I want to kind of, you know, take a Natalie. I don’t have six weeks. I No, no, no, I have no problem with you. But trust me, I have no problem with you. No, I’m just saying for me, there’s another phase of this, but we’re going to get to that probably in a couple months, and in the meantime, I want to have a nice holiday with my family. I owe my wife everything. I owe my wife everything she is the most spiritually ascended human being I’ve. Ever met, and she was kind to me and supportive of me. She was frustrated, she was in pain. She suffered tremendously, tremendously. You’re a guy, you fall in love with somebody, and you’re like, what can I do to make my wife, you know, safe? And I couldn’t do anything to stop what was happening to me, anyway, we’re gonna stop. They’re kicking me out of here. Let me just say I don’t get out there much, but I think I am going to start coming out there after the first of the year. And if you don’t mind, I’ll call you. I don’t mind at all. Yeah, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed this with you pretty much more than anybody ever talked to.

 

David Duchovny  55:33

Wow.

 

Alec Baldwin  55:33

Think Great. My very best. You have a lovely holiday […]

 

David Duchovny  55:50

Some thoughts about speaking with Alec Baldwin. I enjoyed getting to have a conversation with Alec so much. He’s so smart and outspoken, and also he’s a guy who who has had his own podcast for many years. So I kind of went in a little wary that he was going to try to, you know, interview me, and ended up probably talking about myself more than I’ve done in any of the other podcasts telling personal stories, which is interesting, probably because he’s a good interviewer as well as a you know interviewee. But there was, there were things that I had wanted to ask him about that I didn’t get to we could have gone on another hour. Probably we ran out of time. I’m finding this more and more that when I first started doing this podcast, I would look at the clock and I was like, oh, my God, only 30 minutes have gone by. I’ve got to do this for another 60 minutes, because we we record about 90 minutes of talk for, you know, an hour of podcast, which is a pretty good percentage, if you’re using 60 of 90. But I used to be like, Oh, my God, how can I talk for an hour and a half with this person or that person? And now I find myself glancing up at the clock and I’m like, Oh, I’ve only got 15 minutes left.  Where did that 75 minutes go? I think it’s a good sign. I hope it’s a good sign. And I’m much more comfortable in the process of that hour and a half now than I was in the beginning. It was almost like, oh, I got to keep this going. And now it’s like, how do I end it? How do I stop it? So that’s all good. Certainly felt that way with Alec.

 

CREDITS  57:57

There’s more Fail Better with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like more of my behind the scenes thoughts on this episode. Subscribe now on Apple podcasts. Fail Better is a production of Lemonada media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Kegan Zema, Aria Bracci, and Dani Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neil. Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Karpinski and Brad Davidson, the show’s executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova, Kramer and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band. Lovely Colin Lee. Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan and Sebastian […]. You can find us online at @LemonadaMedia and you can find me @DavidDuchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.