Actor Baldwin dumps Twitter, apologises to passengers


9 Dec 2011

Actor Alec Baldwin. Photo by David Shankbone

Actor Alec Baldwin may have sent his last tweet after being removed from an American Airlines flight on Wednesday for refusing to stop playing a game on his phone before takeoff. He has also issued an apology to the flight’s passengers for delaying their journeys.

Baldwin, according to The New York Daily News, urged his Twitter followers – some 600,000 of them – to “unfollow” him, following an influx of tweets about the airline incident.

“Let’s play a game called Mass Unfollowing,” one of Baldwin’s last tweets read. “I want to crash this acct and start again. But, tonight at 10PM, NY time, unfollow me.”

By Wednesday, the name of his account changed to Deactivated001 from AlecBaldwin. His AlecBaldwin account has been deactivated and the Deactivated001 account now does not exist. All Baldwin’s spokesperson Matthew Hiltzik had to say about it was that the actor was “focusing on shooting 30 Rock.”

Baldwin was playing Words With Friends while waiting for the flight to take off from Los Angeles International Airport and, the New York Post reported, became “violent, abusive and aggressive” after being repeatedly asked to turn off the phone. The flight’s captain had to reportedly get involved after Baldwin is said to have taken his phone and stormed into the plane’s lavatory, slamming the door behind him.

“He was beating the walls of the lavatory to the point that the captain called us to see what that was about. They heard it in the cockpit,” the paper quoted a crew member as saying.

In a statement, American Airlines said, “the passenger was removed from the flight and denied boarding”.

Baldwin was booked onto another American Airlines flight. In his apology to the other passengers, he said “it was never my intention to inconvenience anyone.”