'I didn't want to be Tom Cruise': Stephen Baldwin explains why he quit Hollywood
Stephen Baldwin has explained why he walked away from Hollywood at the height of his fame - insisting he "didn't want to be Tom Cruise".
Stephen Baldwin walked away from Hollywood at the height of his fame because he "didn't want to be Tom Cruise".
The 60-year-old actor reached the pinnacle of his success in the mid-1990s with the release of his 1995 film The Usual Suspects, which won two Oscars, but he started taking less roles and he started focusing on his family and his new life as a born-again Christian.
He told PEOPLE: "I probably could have pointed myself in the direction of becoming a big star. But that wasn’t me. I didn’t want to be Tom Cruise, and have to make $100 million at the box office.
"I’d rather be a schmuck from Massapequa! I’m good at that!"
Stephen, who has two daughters Alaia Baldwin and Hailey Bieber with his wife Kennya, revealed the couple's nanny predicted he would embark on a new life focused on faith and he didn't believe her until it actually happened.
He explained: "My wife tells me: 'I just spoke to Augusta [our nanny], and she said the real reason she’s here is because God spoke to her, and she said in the future you and I will become born-again Christians and have our own ministry'.
"I said: 'Hun, we’re from New York but we’re in Arizona and I think you need to go back into the air conditioning and lie down.' Because it was just so absurd."
However, Stephen did feel a pull towards the Church after attending an evangelical festival packed with skateboarders and he went on to direct a Christian skateboarding video called Livin It which kickstarted his new life.
He said: "Down on the beach, they had built a skate park on the sand with plywood. And these funky, super committed, cool, tattooed, pierced skateboarders were there and they’d skate, stop, pick up a microphone and start preaching evangelistically, and like 5,000 kids would be around watching because of their interest in the skateboarders. I felt a calling ..."
He adde of his video: "In the first six months we’d distributed 10,000 copies. Then one of the bigger churches called and asked what it would cost to bring the skaters from the video to their church for a live event. So that’s when I left Hollywood."
