George Clooney Opens Up About Fatal ‘Rust’ Shooting: “It’s A Series of Tragedies, But Also A Lot Of Mistakes”

George Clooney has spoken out about the tragic Rust shooting that resulted in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, calling it “infuriating.”

The actor and director appeared on Monday’s episode of WTF with Marc Maron, which Maron noted was recorded just one week after the fatal October incident. During his appearance, Clooney drew from his own decades of experience to express disbelief at how the Rust set was managed prior to the shooting.

“I’ve been on sets for 40 years and the person that hands you the gun, the person who is responsible for the gun, is either the prop person or the armorer. Period,” he said. “Every single time I’m handed a gun on set… I look at it, I open it, I show it to the person I’m pointing it to, I show it to the crew. Every single take, you and it back to the armorer when you’re done and you do it again.”

While Clooney noted that he doesn’t think actor Alec Baldwin (who pulled the trigger on the prop gun that unexpectedly fired a live round), he called out the production company for hiring armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reid rather than a more experienced professional.

“A 24-year-old person shouldn’t probably, with that little experience, be heading up a department with the guns and bullets,” he said.

Clooney added that many industry safety protocols were partially established because of “what happened to Brandon [Lee].” The actor died in 1993 on the set of The Crow when another actor shot him with a prop gun that unexpectedly had a bullet lodged in its barrel. He also mentioned his friend Jon-Erik Hexum, who accidentally shot himself on a TV set in 1984 when he jokingly held a gun loaded with blanks to his head. “It’s a series of tragedies, but also a lot of mistakes,” Clooney said.