Alec Baldwin covers the May issue of Vanity Fair. He’s got a lot of stuff going on right now: his repeat performances on Saturday Night Live, his voice work in Boss Baby and a new book called Nevertheless: A Memoir. Instead of doing a standard profile of Baldwin, VF published some excerpts from his memoir and I ended up… enjoying this. Like, I think Baldwin is probably a major a–hole in his personal life, but I also think he’s one of the greatest American character actors of all time. He’s charismatic on-and-off the screen, he’s crazy talented and he’s funny. Part of me knows that my feelings about Baldwin are mostly about my love of 30 Rock, but hey, why not? Anyway, you can read the full Vanity Fair piece here. Some highlights:

The first time he met Tina Fey: When I first met Tina Fey—beautiful and brunette, smart and funny, by turns smug and diffident and completely uninterested in me or anything I had to say—I had the same reaction that I’m sure many men and women have: I fell in love. Tina was then the head writer at Saturday Night Live, and I was hosting that week’s show. The writers and producers were packed, impossibly, into Lorne’s satellite office overlooking Studio 8H, where S.N.L. is produced… When Lorne finished giving his notes after the dress rehearsal, I asked Marci Klein, who coordinated the talent, if Tina was single. She pointed to a man sitting along the wall. Or maybe he was standing? This was Jeff Richmond, Tina’s husband. Jeff is diminutive. Tina describes him as “travel-size.” When I saw him, I thought, What’s she doing with him? With his spools of curly brown hair and oversize eyes, Jeff resembles a Margaret Keane painting.

Working with Tina: Our characters, Liz and Jack, never consummated their relationship. There was, in place of that, a genuine respect, fondness, and, ultimately, love for a trusted and irreplaceable colleague. For Jack, the only thing better than good sex was a good hire. Over the years, I had bitched and moaned, as only actors can, about being tied to a contract for a show that would never be my own. After Season Five, I wanted to quit. I came back for Season Six, had a great time, and was ready to sign for five more years… As we shot the series finale, on a December night in Lower Manhattan, my building rush of nostalgia for the show hit its peak. Freezing my ass off on a boat floating in a marina in Battery Park City, Jack groped his way toward telling Liz he loved her. “Lemon, there is a word, a once special word, that has been tragically co-opted by the romance-industrial complex.” That night was tough. The best job I ever had, that I will ever have, was over.

His first time playing Trump: When the stage manager took me to my mark for the first dress rehearsal, I had no idea what I was going to do. I mean, literally, the moment I walked out, I just said to myself, “Eyebrow up,” and I tried to stick my face and my mouth out. For the actual show, when I was in the makeup room, I put my wig on, and it was like a scene from a mental hospital. I’m getting the wig on me, and I’m sitting there the whole time going “Gyna, Gyna, Gyna.” I didn’t think about it—I just did it. Now I should probably tell people, “I worked on it for months.”

On Hillary’s loss and Trump’s win: There is no point in dissecting Hillary Clinton’s loss here. Enough analysis of that exists to last us all 10 lifetimes. I had always admired Secretary Clinton’s mind, her courage, her self-control under painfully difficult circumstances, and her tenacity. Trump, of course, exploited the fact that voters across the country would accept him as the sharp, no-nonsense, can-do executive he portrays on television. And he knew that they would not consider the fact that in New York, his hometown and base of operations, Trump is endured, at best. I will not go so far as to say he is a punch line, because, in New York, making a lot of money counts for something, and according to him at least, he has made a lot of money. But Trump was never an admired New Yorker, a sought-after speaker or dinner guest. He has never shown an appetite for the Great Political Imperative that New York politicians must manifest in order to be a real leader: empathizing with the day-to-day hustle and bustle of working-class New Yorkers. In fact, he has actually been an enemy of the working class, refusing to pay many of his contractors and using undocumented workers on jobsites going back to the 1980s. Trump has abused power at every station stop of his life. Now he has the most powerful position in the world. Some people make a lot of money, but it does not fundamentally change who they are. Others become rich while choosing to never honestly reflect on the role luck played in their good fortune, electing to tune out the cries and complaints of those who can only truly be helped by reforming the system that enriches the Donald Trumps of this world.

[From Vanity Fair]

Yeah, I don’t have a problem with what he says about Trump and Clinton. I think Baldwin respected and admired Hillary. And he’s just saying what New Yorkers said about Emperor Bigly for the past year and a half: his hometown hates him. He’s a terrible person. As for Baldwin wanting to ask out Tina Fey when they first met… she would never put up with his shenanigans. She’s too German for his Irish nonsense. But they were magical together as a comedy duo.

Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.