Alec Baldwin set for legal showdown over ‘Rust’ shooting

LOS ANGELES, United States: A long-awaited showdown will take place this week in a historic Wild West frontier town, with both sides seeking justice for a fatal bullet fired from a six-shooter.

But if Alec Baldwin´s trial for manslaughter sounds like the plot of a Hollywood movie, the victims, the stakes and the tragic consequences are all too real.

In October 2021, on the New Mexico set of his low-budget Western “Rust,” a gun pointed by Baldwin discharged a live round, killing the film´s cinematographer and wounding its director.

Such is Baldwin´s A-list fame and the rarity of on-set deaths in the tightly controlled US film industry, the story quickly became a global sensation.

It also polarized opinion, with sympathetic observers viewing Baldwin -- an actor who did not know the prop gun contained a real bullet -- as a victim, and others seeing the death as a result of his allegedly reckless behavior.