Dwayne Johnson Pledges to Keep Real Guns Off Movie Sets

After the incident on the set of Rust last month when Alec Baldwin accidentally discharged a live bullet from his prop gun, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, the entertainment industry as a whole has been reexamining the place of firearms on movie sets. Many have insisted that in order to prevent an incident like this from happening again, production companies need to stop using real firearms and relying on prop ammo like blanks, and begin using fake props instead. One of these people is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, one of the stars of the recently-released Red Notice and head of production company Seven Bucks Productions.

“First of all, I was heartbroken,” Johnson told Variety about the Rust incident. “We lost a life. My heart goes out to her family and everybody on set. I’ve known Alec, too, for a very long time.”

“I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can tell you, without an absence of clarity here, that any movie that we have moving forward with Seven Bucks Productions — any movie, any television show, or anything we do or produce — we won’t use real guns at all,” Johnson continued. “We’re going to switch over to rubber guns, and we’re going to take care of it in post. We’re not going to worry about the dollars; we won’t worry about what it costs.”

Dwayne @TheRock Johnson is pledging to stop using real firearms on all projects produced by his company, @SevenBucksProd: “We’re going to switch over to rubber guns, and we’re going to take care of it in post… We won’t worry about what it costs.” https://t.co/zZnTdxZuYD pic.twitter.com/n1tjAzfbvG

— Variety (@Variety) November 4, 2021

Meanwhile, the armorer for Rust, Hannah Gutierrez, has suggested that an unknown third party may have placed live rounds into the container of dummy rounds with the intent of causing a safety incident.

“We’re afraid that could have been what happened here, that somebody intended to sabotage this set with a live round intentionally placed in a box of dummies,” Jason Bowles, Gutierrez’s lawyer, told Good Morning America.

“We’re not saying anybody had any intent there was going to be a tragedy of homicide,” he added, “but they wanted to do something to cause a safety incident on set. That’s what we believe happened.”