When you play the Trumpster on one of television’s most iconic shows you’re not going to fade into obscurity, but even without Saturday Night Live Alec Baldwin still grabs headlines.

That’s especially true since the release of his new memoir, Nevertheless, which is now being picked apart by critics.

The Daily Beast landed an interview with the most successful of the Baldwin brothers (not saying much), a man who overcame a raging cocaine and alcohol addiction to become a 30 Rock sitcom hero and SNL icon.

Some of the interview below:

In your book you write, “The list of actors who are invited to front big studio films is short. And once you get on it, you will do almost anything to stay there.” So what is it that you’re not willing to do?

I think that’s really, really hard to say because it sounds very self-serving. There are people I know [who made stardom] the most important thing in their lives to the exclusion of almost anything else. Some of them would tank their health because the stress of it made them into smoking and drinking and drugging furnaces. They just became these insane maniacs chasing the glory of this admittedly very rare position: movie stardom at the highest level. Who doesn’t want to be (Jack) Nicholson in terms of your creative output? Who doesn’t want to be somebody who, the force of your performance alone—not camera work and spaceships and girls busting out of some outfit, you know, sex—but the force of your acting, the creativity that manifests itself in your acting, is what made the movie powerful. I mean no one has more titles to his name in the modern world… none of them have what Nicholson has. None. I think to myself: Cuckoo’s Nest, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, all of them. Terms of Endearment. Ironweed. Who doesn’t want that? But the path to get there… I mean, I know Jack. He’s a houseguest of a friend of mine in East Hampton every summer, and he’s all about his kids. And now, at this point, he’s made all these movies, he’s won Oscars, he’s this legend, and if you’re around him, he’s obsessed with his daughter, he’s obsessed with his son, he’s a dad.

You write that in retrospect 30 Rock was the best job you ever had, but you would bitch and moan about it…

I think for me, [30 Rock] wasn’t my thing. I was a guest in somebody else’s house. It was her [Tina Fey’s] show, and you could never go to her and say, “What about if we do this?” Your suggestions were not encouraged. And I want to be very clear that that was a winning formula. Why did she need anybody else’s input when it was going quite well? It was going as well as could be with her being the decider, so to speak.

[source:dailybeast]