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Showing posts with label Alec Baldwin's Body Language in Interview Shooting With Real Bullet by body language expert Patti Wood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alec Baldwin's Body Language in Interview Shooting With Real Bullet by body language expert Patti Wood. Show all posts

Alec Baldwin's Body Language in Interview about the Tragic On Set Shooting with Real Bullet by body language expert Patti Wood

Is Alec Baldwin Telling the Truth?

Body Language Notes from Interview by Patti Wood 

Tonight, the Alec Baldwin ABC interview is being aired as he opens up about what happened on the Rust movie set. I am doing body language analysis of the interview for the media and I have already done one of the clips below.  

 https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1466104944059199489

 BALDWIN SAYS: 'THE TRIGGER WASN'T PULLED, I DIDN'T PULL THE TRIGGER'

https://twitter.com/SusanneBrunner/status/1466367838038364166 

Here are my rough notes:

I would say overall that Baldwin feels real grief, and he is truly sad, and he does not feel he is responsible for the death of Halyna and the injury to the other victim.

 As part of a body language read, you consider what would be normal for anyone in the circumstances and what would be normal for that particular person. What is that person's normal?

Alec Baldwin is a strong, confident man with a big ego. Power and confidence are communicated in three ways, the amount of space you take up, whether your body windows are opened or closed, and with you are relaxed or tense. He takes up space, opens his body windows, and he is fairly relaxed. I know his baseline body language is expansive. He takes up space. He often sits with his legs apart. At the beginning of this interview, he's sitting in an alpha posture, legs apart, arms slightly out from his side. He shows his Baseline normal body language of confidence, perhaps in an effort to feel confident in this stressful interview.

In preparation for and response to the question, how could this have happened? You see Baldwin again, legs apart with his hands between his leg in a downward steeple. A steeple is a hand gesture that indicates a desire to gain control over the situation. This downward steeple is a symbolic representation of powerful masculinity.  All of this communicated nonverbally he wants to be a strong alpha man in his response.

I also do content analysis as part of my reads for interviews like this (I teach how to analyze interrogation videos and detect deceit ). Some phrasing that I found odd is his emphasis on why he's doing this is about because he doesn't want to be the victim. He keeps saying that this is not about him being a victim. I call this "He does protest too much" verbiage. The very act of saying this is not about me snd repeating that statement several times in different ways makes it about him being the victim.

As Baldwin begins to describe Halyna and says, she was "….loved liked and admired." On the word admired, he starts to cry. We see his Squeezed brow, the bowed head, and his hand over his face. Everyone, of course, wants to know if they are real tears if he's truly crying. He's an actor. I can say that this was the moment that if he was going to cry, he would begin to cry because he has to recall, to go back into his memory about the way she was as a human being.

And the aspects of real crying or there. You see his face crunch, That is, the eyes, nose and mouth and forehead pres down and towards the center of his face. You hear the sound of his sobbing. The intake of breath as he tries to stop the touch to his nose that the crying is distasteful to him (symbolically indicating that this crying doesn't smell good) and yet he comes back and continues speaking.

This again, it's him "manning up" He is showing his strength. He wants to be seen as a powerfully strong man.

This is his normal. The viewer may compare his behavior to what they think would be normal for someone who shot and killed someone and injured another and think he should be nonverbally smaller, hold his limbs closer to his body, his legs together.

Baldwin is asked, "Do you think she (The armorer) was up to the job?" Baldwin shakes his head no as he says he assumed she continued to shake his head no as he finishes his response to the question. Clearly, he didn't think that she was up for the job.

Later in the Interview------

When asked if safety and security were at risk because of the budget, Baldwin stutters and looks down and away as he says no and continues to deny that with a facial expression at one point that's full of tears. I believe he feels conflicted and perhaps will always feel conflicted about that. However, he recovers quickly and goes to what we call a media interview to speak a talking point. They planned a statement. He says something to the effective didn't see any security issues. But though his voice is strong, it's a prepared statement, but he is looking down and away and not at the interviewer.

The next part of the interview is all about him. The focus is on him and not the victims. If I were his media coach, I would have said, stick to a tight fifteen-minute interview with the emphasis where it should be, on the victims and their family and the ideally with a call to action to change the way guns and other amour are taken care of on sets.

Also, because of this next moment, the emphasis on him and his feelings and his victimhood shows. As he continues and he talks about how he loves moviemaking, and he discusses what it was like when they called him to work with "Tony" Hopkins and Merrill Street, he begins to cry again, but this time the crying is more expressive; it's louder he doesn't cover his face. We see the furrowed brow, the lines of focus at the bridge over the nose, we see the quiver of his chin, and we hear the tears, The clearing of the throat is verbalized whispered sorry, it's quite traumatic yet feels and shows as utterly real. The nonverbal delivery for his feeling of loss for those special unique moviemaking experiences is stronger and longer and more specific the ones that he grief. He showed earlier in the interview when he spoke of the victim, Haylana, The person that died.

In response to the statement/question from the interview about pulling the trigger, Baldwins responds, The trigger was not pulled did not pull the trigger. His statement "The trigger was not pulled." does not contain a pronoun. There is no I or me. That is a way for someone to distance themselves from the act.

Usually, that's all we hear from the person speaking that they are distancing themselves from the act. It can be an indication of guilt about the action,

He recovers fairly quickly from that lack of pronoun statement and says I did not pull the trigger. But we have another odd word usage. Baldwin says I did not pull the striker trigger rather than I didn't pull the trigger. Typically when somebody is innocent, they usually speak and naturally use contractions, and guilty people Think of their words more carefully with a vocal emphasis on the word not.,

Then we hear him say when I ask again, "say no no no no-no-no."

Here are the rough notes I sent out to my media contact for a story on Baldwin's Body Language in the interview about the Shooting on the set of his movie.

They are my rough notes. He emphasizes the first three no's, and if it had just been those three no's I would've found him to be honest as people when they're in a highly charged emotional state like a missing child or a missing spouse will often say things in triplicate. "My daughter, my daughter, my daughter or my Sara, my SARAH my SARAH."

Here the repetition seems more admonishing as if he is saying, "how could think that that's incorrect." Get admonishing of the interviewer no no no no no . not just a no I didn't do it.

When Baldwin begins to describe what happens after Haylana and the other victim are shot, his normal behavior becomes unemotional and detached. This can happen in someone that's experienced a trauma who needs to emotionally detach, or he could be just re-experiencing how he experienced it at the time that he didn't think that there was a real bullet in the gun and didn't think that she'd been shot. But even with those two justifications for his detachment, it seems odd. If I was his media coach, I would've coached him to be sensitive to what was really happening. Halyna, the victim, was dying.

His apology statement. I have written extensively and even have a chapter in one of my books on the proper way to apologize. Here he makes a common mistake and says to Haylana's husband, " I don't know what to say, I don't know how to say. I don't know how to convey to you how sorry I am."

 This is a distancing tactic. It distances him from the act. A more direct and proper apology would be to say simply, "I am sorry. " I know that there are legal issues in that statement, and some lawyers advise not to use the words "I'm sorry," and people in Baldwin's position in preparation for court cases and legal action are advised in this manner.

However, emotionally for the husband, in this case, a true, sincere proper apology even for an accident has a greater impact a greater Comforting factor for the person the apology is offered to. It seems much more true, much more heartfelt, much more real."


Patti Wood, MA - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com.