It's not just that Sarah can't rely on the rains to come this year, it's not just that the only water left could cost her her life. It's not just that she has seen all her crops destroyed and she is struggling to feed her little boy like thousands of parents living in regions devastated by drought. Sarah is living in fear. And it's not just this Christmas. Your love can make all the difference. There's a Trocha dog I call 1854. Wait for a wait Trochu until love conquers fear.

Alec Baldwin is an actor known for his roles in 30 Rock, Glengarry Glen Ross, and, of course, for playing Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live, as well as his philanthropy and political work. What is it going to be like not to play? Please don't say that. Well, you're always played for I feel like you're a doctor, but I think it will be our movie to and up against the screen.

You know, like, oh, we've got bad news for you out now. Do you have cancer? Well, I think that, you know, we did and we rode that into the ground. But but it was necessary because as much as there's been rounds of people criticizing me for not doing a very specific Trump impersonation, why?

Well, there was a large number of people who watched the show and watched the plus seven show online and watched clips and things like that. I mean, SNL is sliced and diced and research over the week like any other show, especially those shows that have little segments like that where you can post them online, like Fallon and so forth, all those comedy shows, they can repurpose them online. And we've had great success with the numbers for the show.

Very good success.

And then there's been people who are I'm trying to think of the best were the kindest word or to describe people who are really hate my guts.

And they say things that I don't know who we want to get rid of first.

Alec Baldwin or Trump I but you understand that, that people are you know, if I'm 30 years old, let's say I was 30, so that's nineteen eighty eight. I was 30. I'm 62 now. And if and if you went back 30 years from there, then the comedy icons that were or comedy named icons, but the comedy names that were evolving were like, you know, to to people.

Now I'm like Jerry Lewis to them, you know, in the 60s or from another generation so far back. I mean, I'm like a minimum like Bob Hope or something. I mean, a douche bag that they just want to get rid of for that reason alone. I'm going to just to give them a little gift. I'm glad.

You know, what's funny is I think every time I hear a Trump impersonation, I think, oh, that person is impersonating Alec Baldwin doing Trump.

But you know something? The cold opening of the show needs to be a brisk, well paced. It's it's a it's a sketch that's five minutes or less. And this is a horrible analogy, a horrible metaphor. But you got to give that horse the stick all the way to the finish line. You cannot take any unearned pauses. You've got to move. It's brassy and loud. And Brendan Gleason comes along to do his Trump thing in the thing with Jeff Daniels, which was fantastic.

And I was really very admiring of that. But that's another animal. We in the cold opening. A decision I made was faster was better. The Trump that I would do talked faster. He was more kind of monochromatic. I mean, I gave Trump the amount of investigation and the amount of research I thought he deserved, which wasn't very much.

So it was something to come off of where I would often say to them I would give them notes early on in the first season of the second season to insure us. And that is the word to inches closer to some writing where I could do a better Trump impersonation, you know, because there's Trump publicly there, Trump at the podium at a rally, and then there's Trump privately when he's talking to Leslie Stahl and about to walk out of a 60 minute interview, was published and intimate and like he's in the confessional.

It's a very quiet thing.

And then the other one at the rally, you can tell he's very, you know, sleepy Joe. What do we look?

And we say, well, what can we say? It's very. SING-SONG Yeah. He's not a good performer. He's actually a dreadful performer who a lot of what he does is filler. That's killing time. He thinks of the next idea. Yeah. So he repeats himself a lot and he's got a lot of vocalizing. He does to to to stall and buy time before he comes up with this next mediocre idea.

I mean, it's interesting because you have played a lot of powerful characters in one way or another. One of our obsessions during quarantine is my kids and I have watched 30 Rock like 50 times. And that character is an amazing character.

I always use the same quote. You know, Roger Daltrey once said, No one writes rock songs like Pete Townsend and no one sings Pete songs like I Do.

There is a singer songwriter battery there and Tina and Robert and all of their staff, I mean, the whole couple of dozen people that were in and out of that Poppel, Volly, Chandrashekhar and all the people that were writers, Jack Burdett, John. By all the people that we're working with, Tina and Robert, over those seven seasons, they're the funniest writers I've ever met in my life and I just had to just say it. You know, I would just turn to Tina and I would go, what was the scene where Carrie Fisher walks out of my office?

Oh, yeah. And I turned to Tina when the door was closed. And I say, don't ever ask me to speak to a woman that age.

And all I had to do was just say it. Just don't put anything on it, you know, just say it. And the writing was funny. I mean, and I don't consider myself to be that funny, but I but they wrote a lot of funny stuff, so it was great.

You are funny now, but I know what you I it's relative. She's a genius in that way of being associated with that art.

You played now to kind of really deep conservative people in the club. And, you know, I think of like 30 Rock. What do you talk about? Like the Six Sigma trait? Like I had to sit through one of those things that you did that it was like took me to my core. How much you embodied that and but did you learn any interesting personality lessons from, like, what you had to research for that role?

Well, I think whenever you play a character and you revisit it again and again, it does get into your blood a little bit like if you do a movie and you're in and out of those scenes. And when I used to make mostly films and act in films, those experiences were, you know, they could be as short as five or six weeks. That could be 10 or 12 weeks. That could be some monolith was like 18 weeks or something.

We did Cat in the Hat for like five months. And Mike Myers was in the chair for like six hours. So we only shoot five hours or whatever. So it was a very, very crazy schedule.

But my point is, is that when you do a play and you're doing that character again and again and again, and when you do a TV show and you do it for years, the character does tend to inhabit some of your life. So I would be in a restaurant and I would get a little Donaghey going.

Every now and then I could look at somebody and say, Does that glass look clean to you or mean to you?

You know, we just love that. I just was appalled at any mediocre service or mediocre effort. You give it your all or you've got to get written up on the report. And so you read that part. Yeah, I did. Definitely got into my life.

But I'm glad you lost the accent, though, from outside Providence. Yes.

That's is one of the things that I think has been really cool about you is you have been really on the right side of things politically and so has your almost your entire family. Can you explain how you guys leaving one person? Obviously, I don't want to be sensitive, but, you know, you talk about him already here.

I brought it on itself.

So how did that happen? How did you guys all can you talk about that a little bit? Well, you know, my dad was a school teacher who had one year of law school. He went to LSU Law School, and he was one of these guys where my mother's father, my mother grew up and she didn't have a lot of money. They weren't rich, but they lived very well. And her father was a very successful guy. And both sets of my grandparents both graduated from LSU and both my parents and my parents met at LSU.

And my mother's family is from Syracuse. And so when my dad was going to school for a year, his father in law, my mother's father, was paying and he kind of got a little freaked out about it. He didn't want to be depending on somebody like that. He his pride got in the way. So we left after a year. He went down to Long Island, where he got a job as a teacher at a school district there where he taught his whole life and he taught what they used to call social studies, you know, history, economics, what have you.

Contemporary problems was, of course, he taught and different things like that. And he was a very progressive guy.

He was a very, very humanistic, very. And he would always say things to me. And I've said this in interviews before. He said to me once when I was a kid, he said, You think if you were black, you would be Martin Luther King and you'd be pursuing the path of nonviolent resistance and or would you be more like Eldridge Cleaver and you'd be like throwing some elbows here? And there was a long pause. And my father said, I thought so.

You know, if he were alive today, you know, where we've arrived in our society today, where people are going to have to start to embrace the notion in this country, in this country that just as they announced in New York probably ten years ago, they had the census and they said that whites in the five boroughs were the plurality, but no longer the majority. City of New York was forty nine percent at that time, white and fifty one percent people of color and Asian and so forth, Hispanic.

And that's what's going to happen in this country. I mean, eventually white privilege and as it's expressed through presidents throughout our life, with one exception, but names like, you know, Carter and Reagan and Ford and whitey white white people running the show with the exception of Obama. You see that that's going to change, and my father was somebody that kind of understood that, you know, that if we give people equal rights, it's going to I don't want to say infiltrate, but purveyed through every part of our society.

And that's the change I think we see coming now as more and more people of color, they want a seat at the table of power. They want to call the shots. So what are you working on now?

Can you tell us a little bit doing a TV streaming series for Peacocke streaming that's being produced by Universal called Dr. Death, which this woman, Laura Beil, who's a writer in the Dallas area, will cover this for. I think she covered it for the local paper she wrote and produced and was the star of voice of her own podcast called Dr. Death eight part series about this guy, Christopher Dunn, who is serving a life sentence in prison for all of his botched medical care.

He killed two people. He crippled four people, crippled his best friend. He did a lot of energy. Joshua Jackson is playing Don't Change the Lead. And I play a doctor who brings him to justice, so to speak.

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With a seven day free trial only on TV, 18 plus new customers only passes over new terms of play. Do you think you'll do more comedy?

Because I find hilarious. Oh, they announced on Monday that we picked up the show.

We've been developing a show for quite a while. We spent a lot of time, I mean, like this ungodly amount of time producing this thing. A sitcom. They just announced that ABC picked up the sport camera sitcom for me and Kelsey Grammer. So, Kelso, yes.

Kelsey and I are going to do a show where we're two old friends who our nemesis as well. We have a kind of on again, off again friendship and we get reunited. And the third character there, there's a third friend we all meet at some guy's funeral. We all come together at a funeral. And at that funeral, the three of us decide that we need to be back in each other's lives more and we take it from there. But it's a really it's Chris Lloyd who didn't have a family and who did Frasier with Kelsey.

We start shooting that at the end of February in L.A. That is so cool.

I'm not I'm going to have to walk to L.A., though, because.

Yeah. How are you going to get to L.A.? And also, do you have many dogs and kids? We have a guy we can board the dogs with. Go where you can afford the cat woman. I want to board the kids, so I want to take the kids to they fly us out there on a private plane because of the cold. But, yeah, I'm not opposed to flying commercially. It doesn't really bother me. But, you know, what's happened is with the covid, it's like I haven't flown at all.

And if I did everything was like someone's going to give me a private plane to keep away from the whole airport thing. That's tough. I don't mind flying commercially, but with my wife and all my kids, we have to try to book the whole first class.

We what a little time. But you have, though, been very much politically involved and also on the right side of things. Do you will you do more of that?

You know, I think that that for me, it's a question of time because of my age. You know, like if you honestly ask me twelve years ago when I turned 50 what I thought I'd be doing now, I thought I would probably be working a lot less and I'd be a niece on a yacht and have nice lunches and just take off all the time.

And maybe we work if we have to if we really have to go get some cash or do something and we don't really give a shit about any of that anymore. That's, you know, in the past. And that's, of course not what happened. I met a woman that I fell madly in love with. We had five children in seven years. That the most fucked up in this game plan. I'm sixty two years old. I have a three month old son.

I really give everything as in terms of my availability.

But I do think that in this coming year, especially once the vaccine is here, we can move around a little bit more freely. I want to make sure that we twenty twenty election was, of course, the most important election in the world. We always hear people say that. But this one really world and then number two, the twenty, twenty two election is the next most important election. Because if we don't take down some of these senators who are up for reelection and these members of our House, we have to give Biden.

Who is that? Is that that's not my that's not my leader, was it? Right. It may have been one of ours.

They're coming they're coming to the floor.

And I'm like I'm like Fagin and Oliver Twist.

They're coming to get me here in my lair anyway. So I think that in order to give Biden more resources and to strengthen that whole thing, that's what I'm very keen on, is picking a modest handful of Senate and House races and even local races and putting some energy into that and raising money for that. I and I hate the whole campaign finance thing. But, you know, we certainly contemplated not leaving the country because that's always a tired idea or people say they're going to leave the country.

The idea of leaving America, oddly enough, is. Unthinkable to me at once, but taking a break from here like a trumpet won, we probably would have left for like a year and gone to London or Spain or Italy or somewhere pretty and culturally. And we'd wait for the covid to die down a little bit more. And when we thought we could travel freely, we probably would go somewhere else.

And we're still contemplating the same idea. We're still thinking that even though Biden and Harris won, we still think it's a great time to get the hell out of here. You know, after the covid vaccine gets addressed and gets circulated, you know, maybe the fall of next year, we go away for a while to just just to have that experience with the kids.

Because once they get older, this situation that the political race and the covid forcing us to think that we were forced, where do we go for our kids to live a normal life? And what occurred to us was that once we started to open up to that idea, it didn't matter who won the race. Like, we really want to get out of here just now. Not that we want to get out of here the just somewhere else.

We want to try for a while and get a taste of while the kids are young and you have this family that's like a very ensconced or at least was in Long Island and politics. Do you ever think about, like, pushing your brother to run for that congressional seat? Well, actually, that brother Billy lives in California. But do you ever think about, like, Baldwin's in office?

No, I don't. I mean, there was a time when I really was very keen on that, but that because of the my kids, you hear that a herd of elephants going to go with the that was something that was a huge dream of mine.

And I really thought my heart was in the right place and doing that for the right reason to demolishing fast. I thought that that was something that was a huge dream of mine. But I think with the kids now, I still think about it. I still would like to run for something, but probably I don't think I would because my wife doesn't want that kind of lifestyle. Yeah, I mean, I really thought that I would if I did that, I would be doing it for the right reason.

You know, it's like if I have now and this sounds like Trump, unfortunately, but the life I have now, I'm very happy with. Yeah. In order to go with that life where, you know, I went to an event, I went to the Democratic caucus in Iowa to give a speech. I was the keynote speaker and I went to Des Moines to give the speech. A few years ago, I went to three different rooms.

There was like the Gold Room, the platinum room. I drove in a room of like, you know, pigs in a blanket and beers and guys with open collared shirts and more of a working class crowd. And they, you know, they have got food in their mouth when they're talking to you. And everybody wants a picture. It is a very kind of retail politics. Then the next room was more of higher donors and white wine and chicken skewers.

And then the third room, the dining room was no drinks, no food. They wouldn't bother eating at the center. They were all on their way to the country club for dinner right after this event. So and that was like the high end donors to this event. And my friend turned to me, the guy that brokered this appearance I had, he said to me, he goes, no, if you ran for office in New York because this is what you would be doing six nights a week, oh, like six nights a week, you're raising money and you're just out there and you don't have any life.

And I love my fantasy would be to be appointed the ambassador to Spain or better yet, my wife is the ambassador. I sit back and she can to work and I just go, oh, no, you're kidding.

And they said that, oh, well, that's terrible.

And I just sit back and relax and enjoy myself.

That's great. I dreamed about it for a long, long time, but I don't think that that's possible. Yeah, that's interesting, though. I mean, you do have a lot you can maybe make one of her siblings do it, one of them not, except for one of them. Have I missed any really important question that I need to ask you my dream now?

I told my wife, I said, let's sell our house on Long Island, right. Let's sell our apartment and convert everything to cash, go and live in and we're going to pick twelve city Italian for a year in each city in the fanciest, most expensive hotel. We'll spend a million dollars a year and tipping people and parking.

And I'm going to go to like the Ritz, Madrid. We're going to go to Rio and we're going to go to the Connaught, going to go to all of our favorite hotels. Tokyo must go to Cape Town. It doesn't matter. In Buenos Aries, we go to these twelve cities and then when we're done, we turn to the kids and say we don't have any money left to put you through school. We have no money. But what has been hasn't been a great experience for all.

I think that's a good plan. It's very Royal Tenenbaums, bingo. I love that. Yeah, I love it. I'm still pushing my wife to do that, but she's busy. Yeah, I can't imagine what.

On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of The New Abnormal for The Daily Beast in future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond, from media, culture, politics and science to help us understand what's happening to our country and the world.

We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favourite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and don't want you to miss an episode if you'd like to follow us on Twitter. I'm Molly Chan Fast and he is the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode.

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