George Clooney on the Rust Movie Shooting

Clooney has a counterpoint to Baldwin's "It's not my fault" mantra. George Clooney calls Alec Baldwin's 'Rust' shooting 'insane'

The “Ocean’s Eleven” star said that despite having “been on sets for 40 years,” he has never heard of some of the apparent safety measures Baldwin’s Western had used on the deadly set.

“First of all, I’ve never heard the term ‘cold gun,'” he said of the doomed safe word that Baldwin believed meant the Colt .45 he fired would not have live bullets.

And Clooney says that even actors are expected to check their own weapons, and not just take someone's word that a gun is not loaded.

The former “ER” star said he was “friends” with Jon-Erik Hexum, who died from a blank in 1984, and “good friends — really good friends — with Brandon Lee,” the 28-year-old son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee who died in a similar on-set shooting while filming “The Crow” in 1993.

“After Brandon died, it really became a very clear thing of, open the gun, look down the barrel, looking in the cylinder, make sure,” he said of industry-wide safety steps that Baldwin appears to have skipped.

Of course given that these were (probably) single action revolvers, you needed a slightly esoteric knowledge of how to check that they were unloaded. Something you could have been shown how to do in under 2 minutes.

Meanwhile Alec's brother Daniel Baldwin says that he couldn't be expected to make his own safety checks.