Public figure Alec Baldwin has come out against life in the public eye, complaining that the lifestyle he lives as the result of a career he willingly chose has become “horrible” and “awful.”
The former “30 Rock” star, whose MSNBC show “Up Late With Alec Baldwin” was terminated this week after he hurled a homophobic slur at a paparazzo, revealed his plight during an interview with Gothamist.
See video: Joan Rivers Defends Alec Baldwin … With a Barrage of Slurs
Baldwin conceded that he would consider breaking free of the chains that his fame has bound him in — if only someone would give him enough money to courageously break from the spotlight.
“If I could get a check tomorrow and never work in this business again, I could just go take a break, if I could do something else, with my family, I would do it tomorrow,” Baldwin vowed. “Or find a way to dismiss this whole public aspect of this work. Because public life now, it is just, it is horrible. It is horrible. It’s so awful.”
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Baldwin also lambasted New York mayor Michael Bloomberg for not protecting him from the photographers who routinely take his picture as he goes about his public life.
“You know, Bloomberg doesn’t want people to drink big sodas, but he wants to make sure those paparazzi have the right to have their lenses five feet from my daughter’s head,” Baldwin lamented.
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Baldwin, whose run-ins with the paparazzi are well documented (most likely due to the presence of cameras), found himself in hot water in mid-November during one such encounter. TMZ published footage of Baldwin uttering a phrase that, at the time, the site reported was “cocksucking fag.”
Baldwin later tweeted that he had actually said “cocksucking fathead.”
In yet another Twitter missive, Baldwin conceded that, as per GLAAD vice president of communications Rich Ferraro, the word “cocksucker” is in fact regarded as a gay slur — a topic that the actor addressed once again in the interview.
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“I’ve said before, if the word ‘cocksucker’ has become … if that word is a homophobic epithet then I will make due note of that,” Baldwin told Gothamist. “I’ve got no desire to offend anyone.”