Alec Baldwin has a message for New York -- Drop dead!
In a 5,284-word essay for New York magazine, the actor confessed that New York City's tabloid media culture, including paparazzi and camera phones, is forcing him to move out of New York and find residence someplace else with his wife and newborn.
"I just can't live in New York anymore," Baldwin wrote article, which hits stands Monday. "Everything I hated about L.A. I'm beginning to crave ... I want my newest child to have as normal and decent a life as I can provide. New York doesn't seem the place for that anymore."
The Emmy-award winning actor was involved in a series of headline-grabbing incidents last year, including assaulting the paparazzi and using homophobic slurs. The "30 Rock" actor has been labeled a homophobe and bigot and has been harshly criticized for his behavior.
"I haven't changed, but public life has ... You're out there in a world where if you do make a mistake, it echoes in a digital canyon forever," Baldwin said in a cover story entitled "I Give Up."
The actor repeated his defence in the article, claiming that he did not view the term he used as a homophobic slur.
"I find myself bitter, defensive, and more misanthropic than I care to admit. And I'm trying to understand what happened, how an altercation on the street, in which I was accused--wrongly--of using a gay slur, could have cascaded like this," he wrote. "There's been a shift in my life. And it's caused me to step back and say, 'This is happening for a reason.'"
He later wrote, "I get angry, and I've said all sorts of things in anger, but I'd never use that word."
Baldwin, who grew up on Long Island, hopes to start over in L.A. The actor also announced in the article that he will be stepping out of the limelight.
"I loathe and despise the media in a way I did not think possible," Baldwin wrote. "This is the last time I'm going to talk about my personal life in an American publication ever again."
In the article, Baldwin also recounted a Broadway feud with Shia LaBeouf that led to the "Transformers" star being fired from the cast of the play "Orphans." He also recounted his feud with TMZ.com managing editor Harvey Levin, where Baldwin decried him as a "cretinous barnacle of the press".
The actor also talked about MSNBC unexpectedly pulling the plug on his late-night talk show, "Up Late with Alec Baldwin." He blamed network star Rachel Maddow for pushing for his firing, calling her "a phony who doesn't have the same passion for the truth off-camera that she seems to have on the air."
"For me, (2013) was actually a great year, because my wife and I had a baby," the actor wrote. "But, yeah, everything else was pretty awful."
