Interview: George Clooney, actor

Published on Tuesday 27 October 2009 15:20

MUCH has been written about George Clooney's natural charm, and there's no denying he's got it. However, his press conferences at the London Film Festival this month edged into exasperation whenever the questions probed for personal details. A fluttery TV reporter even made a circuitous attempt to link Clooney's voicework as fatherly Fantastic Mr Fox to the question of when Clooney intended raising cubs of his own – and got short shrift.

"That was good, I have to applaud you. Thank you for the question. That was a good question," he mocked. "I'm going to adopt some of Brad Pitt's. I owe him a few. But I don't have an answer."

Later, he tries to make light of press interest in his romantic plans. "My experiences with women are no different than anyone else's – they just get more attention," says Clooney, who brought his girlfriend, Italian model Elisabetta Canalis, to his premieres this month. "It's funny that people care about an old guy like me and who he's dating, but I'm prepared for a few more decades of having to deal with it – look at Jack Nicholson."

Like Nicholson, George Clooney is one of Hollywood's favourite playboys. And since Warren Beatty stopped making good movies, he's also stepped up as the new Mr Right for left-wing showbiz types. In short, Clooney, 48, is close to a perfect storm of movie glamour and political consciousness. It's just odd that, after almost a year of movie silence, someone with his strategic smarts is bombarding us with his movies.

Clooney is slightly frayed this month as he pings between America, Italy and the UK to promote three films opening this autumn: The Men Who Stare At Goats, Fantastic Mr Fox and Up In The Air. He's also filming A Very Private Gentleman in L'Aquila with Control director Anton Corbijn. "People will really be sick of me by New Year's," he says.

Grant Heslov's The Men Who Stare At Goats is a satire on the American military, loosely based on Jon Ronson's investigation into US psychic warriors. Clooney plays an operative of the First Earth Battalion, who try to kill goats just by staring at them. His character attempts to bring paranormal powers to a contemporary conflict, with credulous journalist Ewan McGregor under his wing. The film sees Clooney in the goofy mode that he normally reserves for Coen Brothers vehicles such as Intolerable Cruelty or O Brother Where Art Thou, movies where he undercuts his sex symbol status by throwing in a set of overwhitened teeth, or a hair wax obsession.

"The idiot syndrome?" he says. "Those characters are funny to me. Nothing is as funny as someone who takes himself so seriously." For Goats, he literally draws a moustache on his screen image – an abrupt, Hitler-esque abomination that survives psychic experiments, kidnapping and explosions. Yet he admits that one of Goats' best jokes passed him by; it wasn't until after he'd shot his first scene with McGregor – in which Clooney asks McGregor if he's prepared to become a Jedi warrior of his New Age cause – that Clooney spotted the geeky in-joke of having him put this to the former young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars films. Goats is the first time Clooney has worked with McGregor since he pushed him around on a gurney in a Quentin Tarantino directed episode of ER.

"We would talk about the motorcycle trips he takes across the world," says Clooney. "Ewan's good to work with as he puts his work first and when that's done you know you can have some fun. He's just a great guy."

In his most engaging moments, Clooney can top this kind of great guyness. He sounds reasonable and polished, and his air of self-deprecation and good humour makes him even more believable. Speaking about suicide bombers, he once quipped: "But, really, who wants 70 virgins? I want eight pros."

So when the liberal pranksters behind South Park skewered Clooney's activism in their film Team America: World Police as a politicised celebrity worthy of extermination, of course Clooney was the only target who publicly laughed. "You can't demand freedom of speech and then say, 'But don't say bad things about me,'" he notes. "You've got to be a grown-up and take your hits."

Clooney's father was a news journalist whose TV work made him a local celebrity around Ohio, while his aunt was jazz diva Rosemary Clooney; consequently from an early age Clooney has been aware of how famous people should behave, even if you think the cameras aren't there.

He has often spoken about how, because of these family experiences,"there is not a moment in my life when I haven't been aware of the idea that at any moment, including taking a bath or taking a shower or going swimming in my pool, somebody might be watching, or photographing. It's freaky, so you have to live your life in a very different way. You don't pick your nose, you know. Or, if you do, you do it under a desk somewhere."

In London, he is sharply dressed, tall and tanned with grey hair cropped down to an Action Man suedeness. He smiles frequently and appreciatively, and it's only when you look closer that you notice the skin of his neck is a little loose and that he looks tired. Still, in the lottery that is good looks there are many middle-aged men who would consider looking like Clooney to be a terrific bonus ball.

In films, he's a national flirt: a more dangerous version of Cary Grant, a less reliable Clark Gable or a tarnished golden boy, la Robert Redford in his prime. Like a young Redford, Clooney excels at golden boys who have something gnawing at their foundations, men who could easily have it all but don't. The Men Who Stare At Goats is a straight-arrow satire, but Up In The Air has more resonant emotional and social topography. It may even be the best Clooney film to date, and seems poised to feature heavily in the winter awards' season.

Written and directed by Juno's Jason Reitman, the film stars Clooney as a jet-setting corporate grim reaper, who travels America, humanely putting employees out of work. Ironically, he's on the verge of losing his own job, and his chance of logging ten million air miles. It has been suggested that the commitment-phobic character he plays in the film is not that far removed from Clooney's own situation: a man nearing 50, whose baggage fits perfectly into an overhead locker. Reitman wrote the role of Ryan with Clooney in mind. "I thought Jason had taken some lines from an interview I did in 1996," admits Clooney. "I actually did say 'we die alone' in the interview.

"The minute I read the script, I understood why I was probably the right person for this job. Part of it requires talking about things that are tricky to talk about for almost everybody but sometimes for me, in particular. Things that are cute when you're 26 aren't always cute when you're 48. I'm well aware of that. So I thought it would be a really good cathartic thing to do."

Reitman's film has a certain credit-crunch topicality, but the film's main theme is our skewed work-life balance, and the disconnection of blogging, texting, Twittering and poking Facebook friends, while rarely looking real people in the eye.

"I would rather have a prostate exam on live television by a guy with very cold hands than have a Facebook page," says Clooney. In Up In The Air, Ryan advances the theory that relationships are like items in a backpack: sometimes they weigh us down, and sometimes they aren't worth carrying. But Clooney says that this aspect of his character is drawn entirely from fiction. "I deal with my relationships the same way all of us do. I'm successful with some of them and not successful with some of them. They're always changing. My father and I had a rough go when I was in my early twenties – as a lot of fathers and sons do – but now he is one of my best friends. My mother and I have always been close. My friends have been a big part of my life for a long time. It's just that sometimes my relationships are a little more amplified."

Clooney keeps his friends close, he says, and they tend to gather at his 18th century villa on the shores of Lake Como, where he spends several months a year. These are regular guys who shoot hoops, watch sport and argue about politics. Houseguests sometimes include the likes of Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, but his biggest friends are writers, directors and school pals. Clooney makes starry Hollywood premieres sound as alluring as office parties, although he does admit to one hilarious pub crawl after an awards ceremony where his fellow barflies were Daniel Day-Lewis, Javier Bardem, Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn. "We got hammered," he says. "And we all came to the conclusion we wanted to be Javier Bardem."

Fantastic Mr Fox is in cinemas now. The Men Who Stare At Goats is released in the UK on 6 November, and Up In The Air on 15 January