George Clooney makes rare comment about marriage to Amal - 'I have nothing to complain about'
George Clooney is starring in Jay Kelly film alongside fellow actor and longtime friend Adam Sandler, and has opened up about how he couldn’t be more different from the character he embodies
His latest role is that of Jay Kelly, a huge Hollywood star on the downslope of his career... not that George Clooney can relate to any of that. The 64-year-old admits some fans have asked him where Jay Kelly ends and George Clooney begins. But he insists there are some crucial differences.
“He’s a d**k,” says George, laughing. “He’s like Frankenstein’s monster. You remember how Frankenstein’s monster kills the little girl by throwing her into the water because he’s run out of flowers to throw in and she’s there? “Everybody I go through, I happily destroy their lives along the way!” In the film, out later this month, Jay is bitter, divorced and lonely. His kids hate him and his friends – with the exception of agent Ron, played by George’s real-life friend Adam Sandler – are turning their backs on him.
By contrast, George is happy with his place in the world, both on-screen and off it. He adds: “I don’t really relate to this character because I don’t have anything like the regrets this guy has. “I have a very different life than he does. All the people that I’ve worked with, they still work with me. And you know, my kids like me.”
His face softens as he thinks of the small twins, Ella and Alexander, that he and his wife Amal Clooney had in 2017. “I mean,” he adds, hastily turning any hint of sentimentality into a joke, “they’re eight. They could change. But at this point they still like me.”
George had a whale of a time working with award-winning director Noah Baumbach, of Marriage Story and Barbie fame – not to mention old pal Adam. “Everything I’ve ever done is an Adam Sandler film,” he jokes with a sidelong glance at his buddy, who is sitting next to him and chuckling throughout our chat. “I’ve done movies he wasn’t even in that were Adam Sandler films.” Another friend on the set of Jay Kelly is Laura Dern.
Now playing Jay’s long-suffering publicist Liz, she was there in the early days of George’s acting career. In 1983, more than a decade before he found fame as ER’s Dr Doug Ross, they made Grizzly 2 together – a horror film about a bear intent on revenge against a group of poachers.
For various backstage reasons, the film was not released until 2020, and was universally panned. “Our proudest moment,” says Laura now, mock-triumphantly. George adds: “Listen, I’ve been doing this for 40 years. If I see a film now that I was in, I don’t remember it as the movie that you might see. I remember it as the experience on the set.
“I’ll remember the crew, or the friendships I made. A lot of the times, some of the worst films you’ve ever done are where you make some of your best friends.” For years, George was known as the last of Hollywood’s die-hard bachelors. He insisted that a brief marriage to actress Talia Balsam from 1989 to 1993 had jaded him on the institution.
His subsequent list of girlfriends included Hollywood starts Kelly Preston and Renee Zellweger, British model Lisa Snowdon, Italian actress Elisabetta Canalis and French TV personality Celine Balitran, giving him a reputation as a love ’em and leave ’em operator on a global scale. He said fatherhood was never on the cards for him and won a $10,000 bet with Nicole Kidman and Michelle Pfeiffer, who reckoned he’d be married with kids by the age of 40.
Then, one summer evening in 2013, a friend visited him at his house in Lake Como, Italy, with British-Lebanese lawyer and activist Amal Alamuddin. George took one look at her, and his socks were knocked off and sent flying into outer space. Now the Clooneys and their twins are among the happiest of families in Hollywood.
True to form, George wears his recently acquired family man image lightly. “I clearly picked right,” he said to me recently. “Now, the question to put to Amal would be, did she pick right? But I picked right.” He says now that making Jay Kelly has made him think long and hard about the nature of fame. “Fame is a funny thing,” he says. “It offers you the opportunity to be able to do the projects you want to do.
“But you run towards it like a bug into the light and then, when you get there, you get really zapped. I mean, you do want it, but holy s***, there’s a lot of other pieces that come into play.”
George is always quick to point out he was not born with a Hollywood silver spoon in his mouth. Although his father, Nick, was a popular local anchorman and TV host in his childhood home of Lexington, Kentucky, and his beloved aunt Rosemary Clooney had been a popular singer in the 1950s, he didn’t find stardom until he was in his 30s.
Until then, he worked a variety of different jobs to make ends meet, giving him a true sense of perspective. He says: “When I was a young guy, I had a job cutting tobacco for $3 an hour, and I used to watch Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
“And I’d watch it and I’d hear some famous actor complaining about their life and I’d be, like: ‘F*** you, I’m cutting tobacco.’ I don’t find any reason to complain about anything about being famous and I don’t find anything I have to complain about.
“I caught that brass ring. I got very lucky in my career and in my life, and a lot of what fame has afforded me is the ability to make films like this. And I am lucky to have been offered this role of Jay Kelly. You know, I’m 64 years old – these parts don’t come along very often.
“Yeah, there are things that you can’t do and there are things about fame that are limiting. But, you know, it’s a lot worse cutting tobacco.”
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