Alec Baldwin Quits Twitter Again Amid Fallout From Gillian Anderson Dig

The “30 Rock” actor announced his decision to quit the platform in a nearly 10-minute video posted to Instagram late Wednesday. The move, he explained, was in response to backlash he received for commenting on Gillian Anderson’s use of an American accent during her Golden Globes acceptance speech last weekend.

Baldwin stopped short of mentioning Anderson by name in his video, but said he was a “huge fan” of the actor whose work he had referenced on Twitter. His comment, he added, had been intended to “illustrate the point that I find, as I said, that the multicultural expressions of anyone ― whatever country, language, music, food, clothing, art, any of it, whatever of those expressions are important to you ― that’s your business.”

“Of course you can’t do any irony on Twitter,” he said elsewhere in the clip, later blasting the platform as a place “where all the assholes in the United States and beyond go to get their advanced degrees in asshole-iness.”

Earlier Wednesday, Baldwin had tweeted a CNN report about Anderson’s performance as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Netflix’s “The Crown,” for which she nabbed a Golden Globe. The article noted that Anderson, who was born in Chicago but spent much of her childhood in London, had “accepted the award using her American accent.”

“Switching accents? That sounds…fascinating,” he wrote in the tweet.

The remark was a less-than-subtle reference to recent controversy surrounding Baldwin’s wife, Hilaria Baldwin. Since December, the yoga and health entrepreneur has been dogged by criticism after presenting herself as Spanish ― a claim that had been publicly corroborated by her husband ― even though she was born and raised in Boston by American parents.

The Anderson remark was the second time this week that Baldwin, who briefly quit Twitter in January following his wife’s heritage debacle, had made headlines with his mercurial online presence.

On Monday, he and Hilaria announced the arrival of their sixth child, Lucia. When someone questioned how the couple could have conceived a daughter so soon after they welcomed a son, Eduardo, in September 2020, Baldwin reportedly fired back, “You should shut the fuck up and mind your own business.”

It was later confirmed that the Baldwins had used a surrogate.