Oscar-winning actor George Clooney, fresh off his Broadway debut this spring, is opening up about his fame, his father, his next movie (Jay Kelly with Adam Sandler) and why he and Amal decided to raise their twins in France.
This weekend Clooney gives his second extended interview to CBS News in seven months, appearing on CBS Sunday Morning (9 a.m. Sunday).
The 1979 Augusta High School graduate was featured on 60 Minutes in March before making his Broadway debut, at age 63, as legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, And Good Luck.
CBS correspondent Seth Doane met Clooney at the Venice Film Festival in late August to talk about Jay Kelly, plus discuss his “life as an actor, father, activist, and entrepreneur” while riding a boat through the city, according to CBS News.
Clooney tells Doane that he’s enjoyed a versatile career in drama (his Oscar-winning Syriana, Michael Clayton, Up In The Air), comedy (O Brother, Where Art Thou?), comedy-drama (The Descendants, Ticket To Paradise), caper/thrillers (the Ocean’s trilogy) and romance (One Fine Day). He sees himself as a contact baseball player who consistently hits doubles into the gap, instead of slugging prodigious home runs.
“I have had a tremendous amount of success, but not over-the-top success. You know, not the multi-billion-dollar franchises. The Ocean’s films were big, but a lot of my successes were doubles. Michael Clayton, it cost $12 million, and we brought in like $90 million, right? But it’s a great film. So if you do those a few times . . . because it hasn’t been massively successful, you don’t get pigeonholed” into only doing drama or comedy.
“I’ve been allowed to do O Brother and Syriana, you know? . . . I get to do stuff that a lot of actors don’t get to do, because they got famous doing an action film, so they’re an action star. They got famous doing comedy, so they can’t do drama. And I didn’t have that kind of massive success, so I’m sort of the beneficiary of hitting doubles instead of, you know, hitting them out of the park.”
Here’s the latest Clooney news about:
On his father, Nick Clooney
Good Night, And Good Luck ended in June with a live telecast from New York’s Winter Garden Theatre on CNN and CNN.com. In its Oct. 8 cover story on Clooney, Esquire magazine said that he wanted to televise the Murrow play because his father Nick, 91, “was too old to travel” from Augusta, Kentucky, to New York to see it. George co-wrote the movie — and the play — because Murrow was his father’s journalistic hero. Murrow stood up to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who claimed Communists had infiltrated the government, Hollywood studios, and other areas of American society.
“At the end, when Clooney delivered Murrow’s closing monologue and the screen went to black, his father stood up, right there in the living room, and saluted the TV,” wrote Ryan D’Agostino.
On home in France
George and Amal own places in London, New York City, and on Lake Como, Italy — and rent an apartment in Los Angeles — but they’ve chosen to raise their 8-year-old twins Ella and Alexander on a farm in France, he told Esquire.
“I was worried about raising our kids in L. A., in the culture of Hollywood. I felt like they were never going to get a fair shake at life . . . I don’t want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don’t want them being compared to somebody else’s famous kids,” says Clooney, who grew up in Fort Mitchell, Mason and Augusta while his father worked for WLWT-TV, WCPO-TV, and WKRC-TV in the 1960s and ‘70s.
House Beautiful in May described the Clooneys’ “astounding global real estate portfolio.” Their 18th-century Italian villa home has 25 rooms, plus tennis courts and an outdoor pool. Their 425-acre wine estate in Brignoles, France, features a 25-acre vineyard, 72-foot pool, and 1,200 olive trees.
On his ‘fairly normal’ life
Although his father was a Cincinnati newscaster, Clooney didn't "grow up around fame," he tells Doane.
"So when I met someone famous, I was always like, oh my God! . . . So I know what it's like to encounter someone that you've seen on your TV or on your phone or in the movie theater, and how you know that can take you back. And so I always try to remind people that honestly how this is the job that I do and that . . . we're all fairly normal. I think because I was raised to try to make sure that not only that you treat everyone equally, but that everyone treats you equally.”
From Venice, with love
How a famous actor treated — and mistreated — others during his career is the theme of Jay Kelly. Clooney stars as the title character who “embarks on a journey of self-discovery, confronting his past and present with his devoted manager Ron (Sandler),” according to the Internet Movie Database.
The Venice Film Festival audience was very impressed, giving the film a 10-minute ovation, according to Deadline.com. Reviewer Pete Hammond says Clooney “does some of his best screen acting” in a film that “effortlessly changes tone from light comic situations to poignant drama.”
On being Mr. Fix-It
During writer D’Agostino’s seven-hour visit with Clooney at Lake Como, the actor recalled how the fan belt broke while driving with Amal in his 1962 Chrysler.
“I said to Amal, ‘Give me your stockings.’ And she took her stockings off, and I made a fan belt out of her stockings and got us home,” he says. Clooney said he inherited the fix-it knack from his mother, Nina, who likes to repurpose items, such as turning an old Singer sewing machine into a lamp, Esquire says. She owns an antique store in Augusta called Nina’s.
The day before D’Agostino chatted with Clooney the actor says he took apart and fixed “a big industrial coffee machine that wasn’t working.”
On the journalism battleground
On March 23, 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim interviewed Clooney about his Broadway debut in a play adapted from his 2005 Oscar-nominated movie, Good Night, And Good Luck. Clooney talked about how Murrow’s courage speaking truth to power resonates today.
“Journalism and telling truth to power has to be waged like war is waged. It doesn't just happen accidentally. You know, it takes people saying, ‘We're gonna do these stories, and you're gonna have to come after us,’ “ Clooney said.
One big difference between Murrow’s reporting 70 years ago and today is the rampant misinformation and dis-information obfuscating the truth, Clooney said. McCarthy would hold up “a blank piece of paper and say, ‘I've got a list of names’ . . . That was his version of fake news. We now are at a place where we've found that it's harder and harder and harder to discern the truth. Facts are now negotiated.”
Clooney also told 60 Minutes about operating the teleprompter for his father’s newscasts at WKRC-TV as a teenager in the 1970s.
“In those days, a teleprompter was sheets of paper taped end-to-end with a camera pointed down. And you'd feed them like this, underneath the camera. And my dad would be able to read it on the teleprompter. And then at the commercial they'd say, ‘OK, cut three minutes out of that story.’ And you had at the end of it a paper cutter. And you'd just go ‘sh-dunk’ ” and cut the script."
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