Alec Baldwin has said he deactivated his Twitter account following the reaction to a comment he made about Gillian Anderson.
The Hollywood actor responded to a post about Anderson - who is American but played Margaret Thatcher in The Crown - "switching accents".
Baldwin wrote "switching accents? That sounds . . . fascinating", apparently a reference to his wife Hilaria, who was engulfed in controversy after allegedly faking her Spanish heritage.
The 62-year-old 30 Rock star, who recently became a father for the seventh time, shared a lengthy video on Instagram while driving home and announced he had deleted his Twitter account.
While not mentioning Golden Globe winner Anderson by name, he denied he was having a dig.
He said: "Of course you can't do any irony on Twitter. You can't do any irony in the United States anymore, because the United States is such an uptight, stressed-out place and such an unpleasant place right now."
Baldwin said he was a "huge fan" of Anderson and his comment was intended to "illustrate the point that multicultural expressions of anyone . . . that's your business".
He added he had "not meant at all to be offensive". Baldwin described Twitter as being filled with "a lot of haters".
He said: "Twitter is one-third interesting posts . . . one-third tedious, uninteresting, puerile nonsense, and then it's one-third, or more maybe, just abject hatred and malice and unpleasantness."
Hilaria, a 37-year-old yoga teacher and influencer, was accused of misleading people over her heritage after it emerged she was born in Boston and was originally named Hillary.
It was claimed she had faked a Spanish accent. She and Baldwin, who married in 2012, announced this week they had welcomed a sixth child together.
