'I didn't pull the trigger,' says Alec Baldwin

Alec Baldwin repeatedly denies pulling the trigger of the gun that misfired on the set of Rust and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, according to a trailer for an exclusive interview with him set to air Thursday evening.

In the clip, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News says, “It wasn’t in the script for the trigger to be pulled.”

“Well, the trigger wasn’t pulled, I didn’t pull the trigger,” Baldwin responds.

“So you didn’t pull the trigger?” Stephanopoulos asks.

“No, no, no. I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger, never,” Baldwin asserts.

The clip is shown without context. The full interview will air Thursday, Dec. 2 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

Baldwin’s last statement appears at odds with testimony provided by Rust director Joel Souza, who told an investigator the shooting happened while rehearsing a scene where Baldwin draws and points the gun directly at the camera.

After practicing how he would “cross-draw” the revolver across his body, Baldwin said, “So, I guess I’m gonna take this out and go, ‘Bang!’”

Souza was standing behind that camera with Hutchins and the cameraman when the gun discharged. Hutchins was wounded in the chest and pronounced dead at the hospital. Souza caught her as she fell and was also injured in the shoulder by the blast, which he described as sounding like “a whip and a pop.”

Filming of Rust was halted following the incident.

Rust is a passion project of Baldwin’s, it’s $7 million budget much smaller than the star’s usual projects. However, the tight budget resulted in a production that pushed its filming and production crews to their limits. Six members of the camera crew had walked out the day of the shooting due to lack of pay and working conditions.

Some of the complaints were over safety protocols, including gun inspections, not being strictly followed. Guns on set were to be inspected first by armorer Hanna Gutierrez-Reed, then checked again by assistant director David Halls, who would then hand them to the actors. However, actors had been handed guns by both Halls and Gutierrez-Reed, against the industry standard of a precise sequence of inspections.

Both Gutierrez-Reed and Halls have become key figures in the investigation along with Seth Kenney, a local weapons specialist who was brought on as an “armorer mentor.” This was Gutierrez-Reed’s second job as lead armorer on a film set.

Thell Reed, a famous Hollywood armorer and Gutierrez-Reed’s father, provided a tip to law enforcement that the live rounds may have been those taken from him by Kenney earlier in the year for use in another project.

According to an affidavit, Guttierez-Reed stated that Kenney “supplied the ammunition and weapons to the set of Rust.”