On the evening of October 21, 2021, filmmaker Rachel Mason was on her way home from dinner with her family when she received a frantic phone call about her close friend Halyna Hutchins. “We were [driving] on Hollywood Boulevard with the lights whizzing by and a friend called, and he was saying that [Halyna] had died, and something about Alec Baldwin,” she exclusively tells Us. At the time, Hutchins was working as a cinematographer on the film Rust, which Baldwin starred in and produced. “I thought he was making a weird joke,” recalls Mason, “but he was very insistent, and he told me to go [online], and [when I did], I saw her name and the headlines, and I just remember screaming. My partner pulled the car over, and my son looked so scared. It was awful.”
Mason would soon learn the harrowing details of what had happened. While filming at the Bonanza Creek Ranch movie set near Santa Fe, New Mexico, Hutchins and Baldwin were rehearsing a scene in a small church when the actor drew a prop gun from his holster and it went off. The bullet struck Hutchins in the chest and wounded director Joel Souza in the shoulder. Hutchins, 42, was airlifted to University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, where she was pronounced dead. (She is survived by her husband, Matthew Hutchins, and their son, Andros, who was 9 when she died.)
The tragedy rocked the movie industry and dominated the news cycle. Baldwin faced intense scrutiny as reports emerged of on-set tensions and crew departures over safety concerns and working conditions. In a statement after the shooting, Baldwin, now 68, called Hutchins’ death “a tragic accident.” During a December 2021 interview with ABC News, he denied pulling the trigger. Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter in January 2023, but prosecutors dropped the charges that April. He was indicted again in January 2024; that July, a judge dismissed the case with prejudice after finding that police and prosecutors had withheld evidence from the defense.
Five years after the incident, questions remain about what went wrong and who’s to blame. “There are 15 safety measures for weapon safety on set,” Brook Yeaton, a film industry firearms expert appointed by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees in 2024, tells Us. “In my opinion, all were disregarded,” he adds. “This was completely avoidable.”
For Hutchins’ loved ones, the loss remains deeply personal. “I miss her so much,” says Mason, who directed the 2025 documentary Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna. “I wish more people could know what a wonderful, spectacular person she was.”
Horrible Loss
Those closest to Hutchins describe the Ukrainian-born cinematographer as a kind soul who was passionate about her work. “She was deeply connected to her friends and her family and also her career,” says Mason, adding that it’s hard to describe her friend’s brightness and enthusiasm adequately. “She was so present. And she was committed. If she said she was going to be somewhere, she showed up — with bells on.” In a social media post after her death, Matthew said the family’s loss was “enormous,” adding, “Halyna inspired us all with her passion and vision.” Mason says making Last Take and exploring Hutchins’ personal archives deepened her appreciation for her friend. “It gave me a sense of her goodness. She was such a good human being to the core.”
Chaos on Set
By many accounts, the production of Rust — an indie Western with a tight budget — was troubled well before Hutchins’ death. In his resignation letter, first assistant camera operator Lane Luper cited a lack of safety meetings, two accidental weapons discharges and an accidental discharge of special effects explosives.
Actress Shannon Lee — whose brother, Brandon Lee, was fatally shot in 1993 while filming The Crow — says she was “filled with rage” when she heard about Hutchins’ death. (Their dad was martial arts legend Bruce Lee.) Brandon died after a blank cartridge propelled a bullet lodged in the gun’s barrel. “[The similarities between Brandon and Halyna’s deaths] are the lack of concern for the very real consequences that were possible and the absolute s***show of a production that was being run by the producers,” she says.
Shannon tells Us that after her brother’s death, she hoped the Screen Actors Guild would implement firearms safety training for actors — “how to check a gun, where not to point a gun.” She also believes visual effects should replace real guns on sets. “Entertainment shouldn’t involve the risk of someone’s life,” she says. “And for those who say that actors need a real gun in order to react better, [they] should hire better actors.”
The film’s armorer and props assistant, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison in April 2024. She was released on parole in May 2025. Assistant director Dave Halls pleaded no contest to negligent use of a deadly weapon and received six months of unsupervised probation. Prosecutors in Baldwin’s case said they had evidence he “was not present for required firearms training” prior to filming, while his lawyers said he “was an actor, acting” and had “committed no crime.”
Calls for Accountability
In a February 2022 interview with Today, Matthew said he was angry at Baldwin for not “accepting responsibility,” adding, “The idea that the person holding the gun and causing it to discharge is not responsible is absurd to me.” That October, Matthew announced a settlement in the family’s wrongful death lawsuit against Baldwin and other defendants. The terms were not disclosed. Lawyers for Hutchins’ parents and sister, who refiled a negligence lawsuit in New Mexico in June 2024, criticized Baldwin’s 2025 TLC reality series, The Baldwins, calling it a shameless attempt to rehabilitate his image. In the show’s pilot, the father of eight spoke of the toll Hutchins’ death has taken on his family and said, “I think about her every day.”
Yeaton feels the industry has made some positive changes, citing the hiring of skilled armorers and increased use of nonlethal “green gas” or “blow back” weapons. “I do feel that progress, not perfection, has been made,” he says. Shannon questions whether Hollywood has done enough to improve safety. “As far as I know, [since Brandon’s death] there were not many — if any — actual rules implemented to make sets safer around the use of guns.”
Finding Closure
Production on Rust resumed in April 2023, 18 months after Hutchins’ death, and the movie was released in the U.S. in May 2025. The decision to finish the film drew criticism, but Mason says she wanted Last Take to explain why Hutchins’ loved ones supported sharing her final work with the world. “It was important to show that Rust was completed out of love for her and for her family.”
The documentary was Matthew’s idea, Mason says. “He helped to get it started, and then his job was to walk away and find a path to a new life without Halyna — another unthinkable task which he handled with grace.” Mason’s main goal was to honor her friend as an artist, wife and mother. “It felt like something necessary to protect her, and I was very committed to making a film that wasn’t going to be a true-crime TV show about her death. I want her to be remembered for the person she was.”
