Rookie armorer on Baldwin set said ‘best part’ of job proving ‘how safe’ guns are
The rookie armorer in charge of weapons when Alec Baldwin accidentally shot dead his cinematographer on the set of his film “Rust” said on a recent podcast that the “best part” of her job is proving “how safe” guns are.
Hannah Gutierrez Reed, a 24-year-old former model, told the “Voices of the West” podcast last month about landing the “pretty sweet gig” with her first movie as head armorer in August.
“I think the best part about my job is just showing people who are normally kind of freaked out by guns how safe they can be and how they’re not really problematic unless put in the wrong hands,” Reed said.
She said her dad, well-known Hollywood armorer Thell Reed, gave her some direction growing up — but she “figured” out most of the job requirements on “my own.”
She also admitted that “loading blanks” is the “scariest thing to me” — the issue seemingly behind the fatal accident on the New Mexico set of Baldwin’s movie “Rust,” only her second head-armorer job.
She told the podcast how she learned by herself how to make sure dummy rounds were in the right spot of any weapons being used.
“You have to like look at the front of it and determine which one is the blank, if it’s dummied up. That’s how I tell, at least,” she said.
Reed also recalled how she had previously been a model but then wanted to be either an actress or a director of photography, the position held by Halyna Hutchins when she was shot dead by Baldwin last Thursday.
She switched course to being an armorer after she “tried it with Dad one time and realized I had a natural knack for it,” she said, calling it “a pretty sweet gig.”
“Every movie I’m learning new and new things — it’s all very quick,” she said, stressing that she is “still learning.”
As The Post previously reported, Reed admitted that she “was really nervous” before her first job as head armorer, on Nicolas Cage’s “The Old Way” in August, that she “almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready.”
She said she expects it to turn into a “really long and cool career.”
Her dad is a former Marine who was Brad Pitt’s gun coach on “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and a quick-draw expert on “Django Unchained.”
Despite her inexperience, the prop master who supervised Reed on “The Old Way” insisted that he was “stymied” by the possibility she could be involved in last week’s fatal shooting, which also injured “Rust” director Joel Souza.
“I’m surprised that any of this happened under her watch,” Jeffrey Crow told the Los Angeles Times.
“I thought she was an exceptionally young, up-and-coming, very eager and talented armorer.
“She was without a lot of experience, but coming from her family lineage, I thought she was exceptional, professional, and I thought she had — I still think she has — many years of an amazing career ahead of her,” Crow said.
“I had a lot of faith in her, and I still do. I’m gonna be surprised if there was anything she was ultimately responsible for in all this, just seeing how she acted in the past. This is all such a surprise.”
