Alec Baldwin explains why he loves Long Island and the Hamptons

Alec Baldwin, who this month hosts both a lecture series at Guild Hall and the SummerDocs documentaries at the Hamptons International Film Festival, explained his affinity for the Hamptons in a new interview.

“I live in Amagansett, and one of the great things about it is that it’s small,” the two-time Emmy Award-winner, 59, says in the new issue of Hamptons magazine. “You can live where my wife and I live and be near the beach, or you’re near the bay and the little village, where you can shop and have lunch. The other thing I love is to go out on my boat. When you have a boat, you are really, really lucky [because] you see all of the real benefits of being here and you have peace and quiet away from the crowds. But I have to say my favorite thing to do is absolutely nothing, just be with my kids.”

His relationship with the film festival began a decade ago when he was shooting the NBC sitcom “30 Rock” at Long Island City’s Silvercup Studios, whose president, Stuart Match Suna, co-founded the festival. “[He] would come down to my dressing room and we had a lot of chats about HIFF and coordinated things to grow the festival,” Baldwin says.

The star concedes it wasn’t an auspicious start. “I thought, Who needs another film festival when you’ve got plenty in New York? And then I attended, and I really grew to like it a lot, and they invited me to join the board. I went to see four or five films in a weekend, which is not a lot, but that completely changed my mind because there were [films] that I thought belonged out here that were indigenous to here, that were more of the culture here.”

The Amityville-born and Massapequa-reared Baldwin, whose films include “The Hunt for Red October,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “The Departed,” “It’s Complicated” and the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, is signing his new memoir, “Nevertheless,” at the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night on Saturday.