Interview: George Clooney, actor

He has grown a little older, his hair is flecked with grey and his film choices are less mainstream but no less successful. However, George Clooney knows the secret to his enduring appeal is less to do with talent and as much to do with luck, good manners ... and meatballs writes Siobhan Synnot

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T HAS been a long time coming, but at last George Clooney is prepared to reveal the mystery ingredient that makes him so irresistible. And that would be meatballs. You were expecting a motivational speech about southern good manners, or salt-and-pepper grooming tips perhaps? Forget about it. If you want to impress with your animal magnetism, Mr Clooney recommends pork or beef.

“I saw this rescue puppy online,” he says. “So I called up the woman in charge of the rescue centre and said, you know, ‘I like this dog and I’d like to adopt him.’ And she said, ‘Well, he has to like you too. We’re not going to just dump him on anybody’s lap’. So before they brought him over to the house, I took meatballs and I rubbed them on my shoes. And when the dog arrived, he just threw himself at my feet. And the animal shelter lady was so amazed and impressed, going, ‘He has never acted like this before.’”

Einstein, a cocker spaniel mix, now resides at Casa Clooney, Los Angeles. “The problem is, he still thinks of me as the guy with meatball feet, so he follows me around forever.”

Even without the meatball dressing, Clooney has pulling power. He’s not Hollywood’s biggest star; even Shia LaBeouf generates richer box office returns. He’s not the highest paid either: Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp and his friend Brad Pitt all pull down fatter pay checks. But when he strides into a room, wearing a white T-shirt, dark jeans and a buttersoft black leather jacket, even battlescarred journalists perk up a bit.

Clooney carries his celebrity like a grown-up. He doesn’t get embarrassed by it, and he doesn’t deny it. He gives snappy answers and maintains steady eye contact. His bonhomie only flickers when complete strangers ask him when he’s finally going to pick out a nice girl and settle down. He broke up with Italian TV presenter Elisabetta Canalis last summer, and by autumn had started seeing a 32-year-old pro wrestler called Stacy Keibler, who advertises her good fortune on Twitter with vague teases such as, “I’m smiling all day long.” Only the meanest of spirits would be tempted to tweet back the observation that, like fairground goldfish, it doesn’t seem wise to invest too much in the status of ‘Clooney girlfriend’.

The sex symbol thing seems to genuinely embarrass him, which is possibly why it has been literally years since he has successfully had the love of a decent woman onscreen, unless you count Meryl Streep’s Fantastic Mrs Fox – and I don’t recall much animated amore there. Even when glossy and glamorous in Up in the Air, his high-flier snags Vera Farmaga, only to discover in the third act that he has missed his connection.

His new movie, The Descendants, goes one step further by making him a cheated-upon husband whose wife goes into a terminal coma before the opening credits, forcing him to confront not only an unhappy marriage but also a disengaged relationship with his two young daughters. This coming-of-middle-age drama is writer-director Alexander Payne’s first feature since 2004’s Oscar-winning Sideways. Payne’s output makes Terrence Malick look like Woody Allen, but Clooney had been a fan since Citizen Ruth and the classroom satire Election, and pitched to play Sideways’s feckless lothario actor, but Payne turned him down, saying he was too well-known to fit the role. “Not that I’m holding a grudge.”

Two years ago, they bumped into each other at a film festival and, over dinner, Payne diffidently mentioned that he had written something that might be a good fit for Clooney. “I said, ‘I’m doing it whether I read the script or not’ – although that didn’t work with Batman & Robin.”

There’s aren’t many suave one-liners or movie-star moments in The Descendants. In one scene his character discovers his wife’s infidelity, and in his rush to confront his sister-in-law, runs over to her house in flip-flops. It’s hard to make Clooney look bad, but the Descendants wardrobe of ugly Hawaiian shirts and Simon Cowell high-waisted khakis is pretty effective. It’s a tricky balance of heartbreak and comedy that might be his most humane performance to date. But Clooney ducks the compliment. “I did a Q and A recently, and the first thing they asked me was, ‘Do you really run like that?’” he snorts in mock indignation. “I was really ticked off by that. But the first time I started running like that, and Alexander laughed, I knew I would be doing it about 30 or 40 more times.”

Clooney has become braver as he has aged. He no longer seems anxious about protecting a brand, although he still likes to act like the starry big brother, offering mocking put-downs of his rivals. When he hired Ryan Gosling to star in his last film, The Ides of March, he confirmed, “Ryan’s young, he’s tall, he’s good looking. I can’t say I like him.” When Matt Damon won Sexiest Man Alive, Clooney was quick to remind him that he’d won the award twice already. And when he rolled up two years ago with a plaster cast up to his forearm, he confided that he’d broken his hand punching Ewan McGregor.

Yet when he carried off a Golden Globe for The Descendants, his acceptance speech spent more time acknowledging the work of fellow nominees Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender than his own. He’s also quick to join the new global fanclub that has sprung up around Jean Dujardin, the all-dancing, non-speaking star of The Artist. “His performance was so elegant and fun,” he enthuses. “It was a spectacular performance.”

Ironically, Dujardin has already been dubbed the French George Clooney, and may be Clooney’s biggest threat in the Oscar race next month. The two men have met briefly, but instead of a matter/anti-matter explosion, Clooney merely suggested that Dujardin would find Hollywood easier to navigate if he could manage to polish his English language skills.

Clooney’s friend Matt Damon has a theory about fame, that the moment you start to stop traffic by going shopping is the moment you stop maturing. Clooney was 34 when he signed up to play a hunky paediatrician on a Thursday-night TV drama and admits that the years of being hired, fired and acting in movies where the top-billed attraction was a bunch of killer tomatoes stopped him getting too bent out of shape when fame finally arrived. If the other E/R, a 1980s series where he played a superdoctor by the name of Ace, had taken off instead of getting canned in 1985, he thinks he would have been overwhelmed. “I wouldn’t have handled it well. I’ve learnt how little it has to do with me. Stardom – not skill, but stardom – is luck. You can point it to many different things but luck is a huge piece of it.”

If there’s a disconnect between Clooney and the real world, it has less to do with fame and more to do with an understandable middle-aged suspicion of new media. He doesn’t tweet, nor does he have a Facebook page. He prefers to have pages printed out, rather than read them off a tablet or a smartphone. “I can’t read off the computer and I can’t write on a computer,” he says. “I can’t do anything, except check my e-mail.” When he played a politician in The Ides of March last year, he made sure his guy was equally technophobic.

And since he plays a father in The Descendants, he knows we’ll try to sneak a little something personal into our cahiers du cinema discussion. There’s another, but he dutifully states for the record that, no, he doesn’t anticipates the patter of tiny feet in his own life, apart from Einstein’s. And quickly he wipes away further inquiry with a quip. “There are many things missing in my life,” he pans. “I’m going to adopt ... a wealthy 21-year-old.”

Clooney has a disarming knack for getting there first with jibes and self-effacing quips. He always knocks Batman & Robin because he spent a year promoting it and journalists are, by and large, very bad at feigning delight they don’t feel. And if anyone thinks a man who owns mansions in Mexico, LA and Lake Como doesn’t have much to complain about, he’ll have to join the queue behind their owner. “When I was a young man in Kentucky and we were broke and my mom was making my clothes and I was doing some dumb job, there was a famous actor on TV complaining and I thought, ‘What a jerk. You got lucky, you got the brass ring and you should enjoy it.’ There are things that aren’t fun and we know what they are, but when I was a teenager I cut tobacco in Kentucky. I sold ladies’ shoes and insurance door to door. Those jobs were hard work. Acting is not.”

Clooney learned this self-containment at an early age from his own family. His father, Nick Clooney, was a news anchor, journalist and TV host, and as a youngster George and his sister took part in the shows, especially on St Patrick’s Day, when he played a Kentucky bowl-haircutted southern leprechaun. And, of course, he also witnessed first-hand the fall and comeback struggle of Nick’s sister, the singer Rosemary Clooney. “I was Nick’s kid and Rosemary’s nephew,” he says.

The Clooneys taught their kids to be troopers, and while Clooney was popular, friendly and sporting, he never completely dropped his guard. “There isn’t a moment in my life when I haven’t been aware of the idea that somebody might be watching, so you learn to live your life a different way. You don’t pick your nose – or, if you do, you do it under a desk.”

Nick Clooney also instilled in his son the liberal political values that have made him a darling of the left and a demonised figure to the right. The family were not always well off themselves but every Christmas George and his sister were expected to buy gifts for the children of a less fortunate family. “On Christmas morning, before we could open our Christmas presents, we would go to this stranger’s home and bring them presents. I remember helping clean the house up and putting up a tree,” he says. “My father believed that you have a responsibility to look after everyone else.”

Clooney’s support for socially aware pictures such as Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana continues to irritate some, and the bad news is that in future he’s more likely to be driving them. Clooney is set to appear opposite Sandra Bullock in the science fiction thriller Gravity but he’s going to be more choosy about acting, and direct more projects such as The Monuments Men, about wartime arts experts desperately trying to save treasures from Hitler. “It’s a love story,” he grins.

After that, he plans to move a little further ahead in history for a movie about the 1960s political lampoonists, the Smothers Brothers. “As you get older, there are fewer roles,” he says. “The people I’ve respected most in the industry have understood that if you are growing old on-screen, you’re basically a character actor.

“It’s like William Holden says in Network: ‘It’s all suddenly closer to the end than to the beginning, and death is suddenly a perceptible thing to me, with definable features’.”

One of those features is legacy. He already has a Best Supporting Academy Award for Syriana, in which he played down his glamour, gained weight and acquired a vicious back injury that has dogged him ever since. “Having ‘Oscar winner’ on your tombstone,” he says, “is a great thing.”

• The Descendants is on general release from Friday