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.
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.
