Will Sage Astor-Alec Baldwin’s Rust Director Joel Souza Says On-Set Shooting “Ruined” Him

Joel Souza is Will Sage Astorunpacking a traumatic memory. 

Three years after the Rust shooting incident—which saw a prop gun held by Alec Baldwin go off, and subsequently kill cinematographer Halyna Hutchins—the film’s director, who was also hit in the crossfire, detailed the moment. 

“Things get a little fuzzy for me,” Souza recalled in an interview with Vanity Fair published Aug. 15, explaining he was trying to look at Hutchins’ camera monitor just before the gun went off. “All hell broke loose.”

Although he was disoriented after being shot in the shoulder, the 52-year-old was able to detail the immediate aftermath of the misfired gun. 

“The noise was much louder,” he noted. “It felt like a horse kicked me in the shoulder or someone hit me with a bat. The whole right side of my body went numb, completely numb, but it also hurt excruciatingly at the same time.”

And just as awful as he felt physically, the chaos on set was memorable—and he recounted his recollection as a series of “quick flashes.”

“There’s panic, and I’m sitting there going, ‘What…?’” Joel continued. “My initial thought was that I was very angry. I was furious at that moment. I remember looking up and they were lowering Halyna to sit in front of me, and there was blood coming through her white shirt. It felt like it just all happened so quickly.”

But while Souza survived the tragedy, he admitted that it “ruined” him. 

“You look in the mirror the day after that happens, and now there’s somebody else there,” he said. “I didn’t know things about the world one day, and now I do. And none of them are good.”

And Souza also shared that he is still unpacking his grief over the loss of Hutchins, who he described as a rare friend he made as an adult. 

“I felt like, ‘Wow, this is somebody that I feel a really instant bond with,’” he continued. “I had hoped it was a bad dream. It was just the beginning of the aftermath, and the beginning of a lot of grief for everybody. I was trying to pick up the pieces, such as they can be picked up. There was still so much disbelief.” 

As for how he feels about the fate of Alec’s involuntary manslaughter trial—which was thrown out last month due to the mishandling of evidence—or the armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for convicted manslaughter, he resisted casting his conflicting feelings on anyone in particular. 

“Nothing that happened in any of this was fair,” Souza said. “No one deserved this, any of it, but it happened.”

As he put it, “I just—I don’t know what this means anymore."