Playing the Cloon
George Clooney flits from surreal comedies to serious political dramas, and is as comfortable in the corridors of power as on set. How does he keep all the balls in the air
INTERVIEW | ANWAR BRETT
Flashy aircraft, whether private jets or commercial are among the perks of Hollywood movie promotion.
But for many stars the journey is about the most relaxing part of it, because the gruelling schedule is usually topped off by trying to dodge intrusive questions about your personal life. It requires a particular type of charm to deflect and defuse questions that can be loaded with hidden meaning.
A master of this craft is George Clooney – and he proved it again when we caught up at the London Film Festival in October. Attending a press conference in a packed West End cinema to promote the three movies he had showing at the festival, he was asked what he had been doing during his visit to the British capital. The undertone: has he used his time in London for an assignation with a lady friend?
“I’ve been here for about 30 hours so far,” Clooney replied. “I’ve eaten in the hotel once or twice, and I’ve done two press conferences. So this hasn’t been one of my greater, get-out-and-visit-London kind of things. I haven’t been able to hit any of the pubs or any of the fun places.” Disappointing? Underwhelming? Only because he knew he had more serious things to discuss – more of which later.
The interest in his love life is unsurprising. The 48-year-old actor remains an eligible bachelor, more committed to his many charitable causes than to his equally numerous romances. Clooney has often said he doesn’t want to remarry (he was wed once briefly, in the late 1980s) or have children – and has even bet fellow star Michelle Pfeiffer $100,000 that he will stay single. Since then, he has been linked with British model Lisa Snowden, former waitress Sarah Larson, and the niece of the late Pakistani prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, amongst others.
But although Clooney knows how to play the media game, he tires more than most of the endless stream of tittle-tattle and rumour.
“I’m the son of a newsman,” he says, “I grew up around news, I can understand the issue which is that papers are losing subscribers and having less and less outlets, it’s tricky.
You’re going to have to sell papers.
The problem is, there’s so little actual reporting any more.
“Somebody will write a story and it’ll be in 1,800 different outlets from one person’s story. If it’s false and you go, ‘It’s not true,’ you have no recourse. They’ll say, ‘We’re not saying that, a London tabloid has said it,’ so they’re just reprinting and reprinting things that aren’t necessarily true.”
BUT HE’S NOT HERE TO TALK ABOUT ANY OF THAT. Clooney – dressed casually, but exuding effortless self confidence – is in town to promote his new movie, Up in the Air, which utilises every bit of his smooth-talking charm. As corporate ‘downsizer’ Ryan Bingham, he crosses America advising companies on how to make themselves more profitable by making staff redundant.
“If you’re going to make a movie about a guy who fires people for a living he’d better be a darn charming actor,” says director Jason Reitman, who previously headed up surprise hits Juno and Thank You for Smoking.
The fact that Ryan Bingham has an agenda of his own, the acquisition of 10 million air miles and consequent access to all manner of lavish airline hospitality, only adds to the fascination with the character at the heart of an entertaining film.
While Clooney is perfectly comfortable in that first class lounge environment, he does not bring with it any sense of entitlement. That’s despite being born into a family highly familiar with media success.
His father Nick is a former TV anchorman, one-time game show host and politician in George’s home state of Kentucky. His aunt Rosemary Clooney was a singer and movie star, achieving a degree of screen immortality with her role alongside Bing Crosby in White Christmas (1954).
Yet for years it seemed as though Clooney’s own acting career would never take off. A succession of cancelled television shows, pilot episodes that were not picked up and obscure movies ensured his star did not rise immediately, even though he made a comfortable living.
What changed everything was ER, the medical drama series that made him a heart-throb around the world, playing hunky doctor Doug Ross.
Then came big-screen success in movies such as One Fine Day and Out of Sight, followed by The Perfect Storm and Ocean’s Eleven, which confirmed his position on the Hollywood A-list. Recent roles have been diverse, including surreal comedies like The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on the American military’s attempt to use psychic powers, and providing the voice for the suave title character in the animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox.
BUT CLOONEY IS NOW BECOMING AS WELL KNOWN FOR HIS CAMPAIGNING AS HIS FILM WORK. He may duck questions about his current paramours but if you want a straight answer, you only need raise one of the issues he has campaigned upon. For all his bonhomie Clooney is one of a generation of actors intent on using their celebrity to help shed light into the grimmer areas of the human experience.
He does this through movies like Good Night, And Good Luck, which exposed the poisonous rhetoric of the anti-Communist, witch-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and got him Oscar nominations for writing and directing. Similarly Syriana, for which Clooney won an Oscar for acting in, was a thriller that picked apart some of the complex issues of the Middle East.
“I don’t think you can make purely political pieces,” he has said. “Preaching to an audience is a dumb thing to do. Good Night, And Good Luck is entertainment; it’s not a civics lesson. And the same with Syriana. But it raises issues and I think that’s a good thing.”
Even more frivolous work, like the Ocean’s Eleven movies, have had a consequence in Clooney’s political hinterland too. It was in partnership with some of his co-stars from those films – Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Don Cheadle among them – that he founded the campaigning charity Not On Our Watch.
The organisation expressly aims to use the collective wattage of these stars to focus global attention on humanitarian crises, primarily Darfur in Sudan. As well as talking-up his movies, Clooney uses his travel time to meet with political big-hitters who can bring practical help in areas like this.
For example, while in the UK in 2008 to promote screwball comedy Leatherheads, he met up with the prime minister, Gordon Brown, to propose a way of getting more helicopters into Darfur for relief. “He was amazingly helpful in that,” says Clooney diplomatically – and no doubt the Brown administration relished the glamour of a bona fide Hollywood star coming to visit. In recognition of this work, Clooney has been named a United Nations ‘Messenger of Peace’, and has been praised by Nobel peace laureates.
In this regard Clooney might well argue that he is merely fulfilling the role of an older breed of campaigning journalist, the respected pillars of society like Edward Murrow – the moral conscience of Good Night, And Good Luck – or the late Walter Cronkite. Or his own father Nick.
Father and son remain united in their support for the people of Darfur and travelled there in 2006 to film a documentary which raised funds for the International Rescue Committee.
“We’re a country that is really deprived of information,” he says of the United States. “We don’t read much. Even if you watch CNN International in our country it’s very, very different information. Until the last four or five years the Middle East was just this thing. A huge percentage of the people wouldn’t have known the difference between Palestinians and Israelis, literally. They’d be like, ‘Yeah. They’re just a bunch of guys in the Middle East.’ That’s been the problem.”
But through all this the actor remains conscious that he treads a fine line between providing entertainment and education. In the end it is the modern taste for celebrity gossip that makes his campaign work possible. Without the media obsession with movie stars like Clooney, this level of celebrity political activism would be almost impossible.
It’s an irony that might be lost on some but still, you’d like to think, it might make someone as smart as George Clooney smile, just a little. Up In The Air opens on 15 January
