Alec Baldwin: The Hunk From ‘Hunt’

Alec Baldwin says he’s uncomfortable talking about Alec Baldwin. His excuse is that an actor’s work speaks for itself. So let’s watch Alec Baldwin taking a shower, instead.

We’re on the set of Baldwin’s film The Hunt for Red October. Given the actor’s cover-boy comeliness, it’s not difficult to imagine that were tickets sold for this event, a squadron of cheap-thrill-seeking females would snap them up in minutes. Women who have seen him in such films as Beetlejuice, Working Girl, Great Balls of Fire, Talk Radio and Married to the Mob would peek from behind barrier ropes, eager for a glimpse of the actor’s sudsy, firm thirty-two-year-old body.

But here on the cavernous Paramount sound stage, there are few palpitating hearts. Just a tired crew surrounding a shower stall that’s supposed to be on an aircraft carrier bobbing on the wintry Atlantic. Their concentration on the task at hand mirrors Baldwin’s. He’s not thinking erotic; it’s not in the part. Actually, in the final cut of the film — based on Tom Clancy’s best-selling, pre-glasnost novel — the scene only lasts a few seconds. It shows Baldwin crouching in a scalding drizzle, mumbling, figuring out how to get the Soviet crew off the Red October should the submarine’s brass truly want to defect.

Baldwin plays CIA analyst Dr. Jack Ryan, a canny, intense yet bookish sort of guy. After viewing top-secret photos of the Red October under construction, he takes some concerns to higher-ups in Washington, D.C. Just doing his job. He’s worried that the Soviets may be ahead of us in submarine technology. But when the sub suddenly leaves her port, Ryan is reluctantly swept into a new assignment. His mission is to find out whether the Red October‘s Captain Ramius (Sean Connery) is a madman about to attack the U.S. or a disgruntled and disillusioned old sea hand trying to defect.

This role is atypical for Baldwin. He has to play it very close to the surface. When picking parts, he has always made the actor’s choice: smaller, career-building work that demonstrates his ability and desire to be anyone onscreen but his real self. An accomplished mimic, Baldwin relishes hiding in a character. But there’s no hiding here, except in the scenery. Though the stars of Hunt are plentiful (Connery, Sam Neill, Scott Glenn), the sub and the relentless action are the focal points. Nonetheless, Hunt is expected to propel Baldwin to stardom. It makes sense. If the box office is big, it won’t be the submarine getting movie offers.

A perhaps more telling example of Baldwin’s versatility is his performance in the upcoming film Miami Blues, which will likely benefit from Hunt‘s success. In Miami Blues, Baldwin plays a pathological thief and liar given to role-playing and mad conversations with himself. His character is relentlessly energetic and completely unpredictable. Dangerous. And true to his habit, Baldwin melts into the character as surely as Meryl Streep has disappeared into a smorgasbord of international accents.

Handsome or not, Baldwin has come this far because of his willingness to go the distance. Abandoning a long-desired career in politics and law, Baldwin did a daytime soap, The Doctors, in the mid-Eighties, moved to a spot on Knots Landing and then shifted to TV movies and the miniseries Dress Gray. (He also works onstage: Baldwin is currently starring off-Broadway in the comedy Prelude to a Kiss.)

In film, Baldwin made his move with a string of juicy supporting roles. He learned from a series of directors, most of whom he greatly admired. He did it for art’s sake. Then he decided it was time to go commercial.

On the shower set, Baldwin towels, changes bathrobes and lounges in his high-backed chair in the shadow of the Red October control room, which is mounted overhead on a towering platform. Despite repeated wettings, his Elvis-like black hair remains astoundingly perfect, retaining moisture only at the edges. Up close, Baldwin’s complexion is so palpably manly that a career in beer or shaving ads will never be out of the question. When he sticks a cigarette in his intelligent smirk of a mouth and watches a visitor with his piercing blue eyes, he seems like an Irish Catholic Belmondo with all-American good looks. He has the mystique, the impulsive energy, the laconic humor. “This was a good day to come,” he tells a reporter before director John McTiernan calls him back for yet another dousing. “My only nude scene. We’re sharing that.”

One week after the shower sequence, Baldwin is back on the Hunt set for a final day of shooting. As in bullets. He and Connery chase a murderous Red October crewman through the Soviet sub’s three-story-high missile-bay set. Then it’s back to real life and other movie projects.

In the five months between the wrapping and the release of Hunt, Baldwin has dropped out of playing writer Henry Miller (and costarring with Uma Thurman) in Phil Kaufman’s Henry and June, worked on the latest Woody Allen film (still untitled), signed to costar with Kim Basinger in Neil Simon’s Marrying Man and, in the face of increasing media coverage, prepared himself for the consequences of his Hunt performance. Baldwin frets that if the film stiffs, it might mean that audiences don’t like him.

A less intimate but more immediate concern is how critics and filmgoers will respond to a movie that might be rendered dated by rapid changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But Baldwin, now talking nonstop, has an answer.