George Clooney has been sneaking outside to smoke.
Not like his friend Barack Obama used to, when he was running for president and his wife, Michelle, was after him to quit. Clooney doesn’t even like smoking.
“I had to get better at inhaling,” he said. “I go outside so the kids don’t see and smoke a little bit.” He plans to switch to herbal cigarettes when he makes his Broadway debut next month in a stage adaptation of his 2005 movie, “Good Night, and Good Luck.”
Smoking has been unpleasant, he said, because in his Kentucky clan “eight uncles and aunts all died of lung cancer — it’s a big deal.” He noted that his aunt Rosemary Clooney, the torch singer and movie star, was 74 when she died in 2002 from complications of lung cancer. “My dad’s the only one that didn’t smoke, and he’s 91.”
Clooney, looking slender in a black Theory shirt and navy pants, sat on a rose-colored couch late last month at Casa Cipriani, a hotel at the bottom of Manhattan. He would sit there for the next five hours, until the sun set over the bay, not bothering with lunch, not looking at his phone, not checking with his minders, just spinning ensorcelling tales about love, Hollywood and politics like a modern-day Scheherazade.
Unlike in the film, where he took on the nonsmoking role of Fred Friendly, the producer of the CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, on Broadway Clooney will play Murrow himself, who had a three-pack-a-day habit and died in 1965 at the age of 57 of complications from lung cancer. A decade before his death, Murrow was one of the first to report on links between smoking and lung cancer on his show, “See It Now.” It was the rare episode in which he didn’t light up.
When Clooney directed his acclaimed movie, anti-smoking organizations chided him about David Strathairn’s Murrow character incessantly smoking.
“I was like, ‘Well, they all died of lung cancer — you can’t not do what is factually true,’” he recalled. His interest in what is factually true — and how Americans no longer start with the same fact base — has led him back to a time when the country regarded some top TV news people as moral authorities.
Murrow bonded with radio listeners during World War II by broadcasting from London amid the blitz, and then with early television watchers interviewing celebrated figures like John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt, plus Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz on the set of “I Love Lucy.” On “See It Now,” Murrow challenged the powerful — most famously Joseph R. McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose name became an “ism” when he indiscriminately smeared and spewed poison, searching for Communists and falsely accusing people of being Communists.
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. … We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason,” Murrow said in his attack on McCarthy, which came a few months before the lawyer Joseph Welch uttered his “Have you no sense of decency?” line during the Army-McCarthy hearings.
Clooney and his longtime collaborator Grant Heslov wrote the movie and the play. They had conceived of the movie as a live production for CBS, like Clooney’s redo in 2000 of the Henry Fonda movie, “Fail Safe.”
“I was always excited by the risk of no net,” said Clooney, who also lobbied to do a live episode of “ER” when he played the dreamboat doctor Doug Ross on the NBC hit. But after Justin Timberlake tore Janet Jackson’s costume and exposed her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, CBS executives lost their taste for taking risks with live TV. Clooney had to mortgage his house to help finance the black-and-white film, which received six Oscar nominations, including for best screenplay.
Clooney had intended to play Murrow but after the table reading, he told Heslov, “I don’t have the gravitas.” Heslov agreed. Murrow had “the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Heslov said in a phone interview, “and at that time George didn’t have it.”
Now, two decades later, at 63, Clooney is ready. “I always felt like there was a sadness to Murrow, and that was not something that you could associate with me at 40 years old,” he said. Now he has to turn back the clock and cover his salt-and-pepper mane with black dye.
“My wife is going to hate it because nothing makes you look older than when an older guy dyes his hair,” he said. “My kids are going to just laugh at me nonstop.”
As for bringing the story to life for theatergoers, Clooney said the stage will be transformed into a newsroom with about 30 monitors moving around, showing old footage. David Cromer, the play’s Tony Award-winning director, enlisted the video and projection designer David Bengali, to help, as Cromer put it, “recreate what it’s like to watch television being made.”
“We’re going to do it onstage with cameras and live feed to mix with the real footage,” Cromer continued, “so you’ll see George and then you’ll see Joseph McCarthy and you’ll see George and you’ll see Joseph McCarthy.”
Clooney said dryly: “McCarthy is still played by McCarthy, which I’m fairly sure he’s going to get a Tony for.” He recounted that before the film’s release, preview audiences complained that “the guy playing McCarthy was overacting.”
Clooney and Heslov started out together as actors in Los Angeles, doing plays in tiny theaters. One called “The Biz,” directed by Clooney’s cousin Miguel Ferrer, was about actors trying to make it. And Clooney acted in a play about Sid Vicious called “Vicious” in 1986 that took him to Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. He hasn’t treaded the boards since then.
People may think he’s a nepo baby, but he’s not really. It was a long, hard climb. When he got to Hollywood, he was a driver for Rosemary Clooney and her coterie of singers. “They would call themselves ‘broads,’” he said. “They would drink tall glasses of vodka. They were really tough and mean and raunchy. And when they got up to sing, they were unbelievably gifted.”
When people tell him it looks like it comes easily to him, he said, “It comes easy because I work really damn hard. Part of the art of doing what we do for a living is, it’s supposed to look easy.”
Almost four decades later, Heslov and Clooney walked onstage at the Winter Garden Theater, where the show starts previews on March 12. Heslov said, “We were both, like, ‘Wow!’”
The thought of being on Broadway, Clooney conceded, is daunting — though he has gotten some moral support from his former “ER” love interest Julianna Margulies, who just wrapped her own Broadway run in Delia Ephron’s “Left on Tenth.”
“I’m terrified of it,” he said. “Are you kidding? I’m doing 11 monologues. When you get older, your recall isn’t the same. When I was doing ‘ER,’ it was 12 pages of medical dialogue. You look at it in the morning and you say, ‘OK, let’s go!’ Now you get older and you’re going, ‘What’s wrong with me? Well, don’t drink any wine tonight.’”
‘Us at Our Best’
He said he co-wrote the movie as a critique of most of the press rolling over ahead of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Clooney called out President George W. Bush for the misbegotten war, and he was called a traitor for being against it.
“It was a pretty tough time,” he recalled.
The movie, he said, was really about: “We need the press” because “government unchecked is a problem.”
Now, with President Trump throwing Washington into a tumult, Clooney said, we are living through a time when “You take a narrative, you make it up, don’t worry about facts, don’t worry about repercussions.” He said the play “feels more like it’s about truth, not just the press. Facts matter.”
Certainly, there are unavoidable echoes of McCarthy’s Washington in Trump’s Washington, a place rife with “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway called them, as well as conspiracy theories, reckless attacks and punitive measures. The White House, for example, wants government employees to snitch on colleagues who are promoting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Associated Press journalists were barred from covering some White House events because the news outlet refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
“No rules count anymore,” Clooney said. “It’s like letting an infant walk across the 405 freeway in the middle of the afternoon.”
He stops, preferring to keep it positive. “I believe that whole idea of the arc of history bending toward justice, and I know it doesn’t feel that way right now,” he said. “I think there are always these pendulum swings. The first Trump election was, I believe, a result of eight years of a Black president.”
As for Trump’s 2024 election, he said: “The Biden administration was terrible at explaining that we’re a world economy, where we were actually doing better than all the other G7 countries. They were bad at telling the story because their messenger was not working at his best, to say the least.”
ABC News’s decision to give Trump’s future foundation and library $15 million to resolve a defamation lawsuit, and a potential settlement by CBS News — Shari Redstone, the chief of Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company, wants the administration’s blessing to acquire Skydance — has sent a shiver through newsrooms.
If Redstone settles, Jake Tapper said on CNN, “It would be the network of Edward R. Murrow at the behest of its owners saying ‘We will not speak truth to power. We will acquiesce to power at the expense of truth.’”
Clooney seconded Tapper, telling me: “It has a chilling effect on the press.”
He doesn’t know if the audience will see his play as a critique of Trump. “I think they are going to like hearing the conversations about us at our best,” he said. “Murrow represented us at our best.”
The star who was once christened People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” said that, in his footloose bachelor days, he met Trump. “He was a New York guy,” Clooney said. “He’d be at a restaurant and he’d be like, ‘What’s the name of that cocktail waitress?’” Trump even suggested a doctor who might help Clooney with an injury he had suffered on the set of “Syriana,” the film that netted him a best supporting actor Oscar.
He added, “We’ve got to hope that he can have that Scrooge night where he wakes up and there are some ghosts of Christmas there that say, ‘There’s some good things you can do for people.’”
Clooney has been wooed by some top Democrats to run for president. Would he ever jump in?
“No,” he said, somewhat convincingly.
I wonder what he makes of the eruptive Elon Musk, who is functioning as a fourth branch of government. “I had the original beef with him,” Clooney said proudly. “He got mad at me because I bought, I think, the third or fourth Tesla ever sold and it just broke down all the time.” He mentioned it in an Esquire piece in 2013 and Musk snarkily tweeted, “In other news, George Clooney reports that his iPhone 1 had a bug back in ’07.” Clooney uttered an epithet, saying, “Who are you? He ended up being Elon Musk.”
‘Do It When It’s Uncomfortable’
In a world with few moral authorities, Clooney hearkens back not only to Murrow but also to his father, Nick Clooney, an anchorman in Kentucky and later an AMC host, who would call out people at dinner if they belittled anybody or said anything bigoted, and then leave the table.
As a child, Clooney recalled, “I would always be like, ‘Well, can’t you just not hear, so we can finish eating?’ The truth is, of course, he was right. He and my mom taught us, ‘You’ve got to do it when it’s uncomfortable.’”
Nick Clooney liked to stand on a chair and recite Murrow’s “Wires and Lights in a Box” speech, about how television was becoming not a tool to inform but a toy to distract — an argument that augured the internet age. Now the tech moguls have superseded the network moguls; they control communication — and to a large extent emotions — in America. Clooney, who has no social media presence, said he sees “a lot of cowardice” as the tech moguls bow to Trump.
Parts of that speech have been incorporated into the script, he said. Murrow warned: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.”
Another addition to the play: William S. Paley, the CBS founder, worries that Murrow is editorializing about McCarthy. Murrow replies: “I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.” Paley says that Murrow is opening the door.
“What happens when it’s not Edward R. Murrow minding the store but Tucker Carlson?” Clooney said, referring to the far-right commentator. “It’s a funny thing how really good and important moments can also open the door for really awful things.”
Clooney tried to inculcate his father’s values. He struggled for years to bring awareness to the conflict and the famine in Darfur. Amid other charity work, he started the Clooney Foundation for Justice with his wife, Amal, a human rights lawyer, to “wage justice” and help victims of human rights abuses, while dropping the hammer on perpetrators.
Last June, Clooney and Obama appeared at a glittery L.A. fund-raiser that raised $28 million for President Joseph R. Biden Jr. When Biden appeared to freeze onstage, Obama led him away. Clooney was gobsmacked.
“I saw him for hours a year earlier at the Kennedy Center, and I saw someone much less sharp” that night, Clooney said. “I’ve always liked Joe Biden, and I like him still.”
But after Biden’s debate meltdown, Clooney wrote a guest essay for The New York Times urging Biden to step aside. People thought Obama was behind it, but Clooney said he did it despite being urged not to.
Many Democrats were grateful to Clooney, who said publicly what they were panicking about in private. Biden, then 81, had promised to be “a bridge” but was stubbornly clinging to power. But Biden’s cordon sanitaire at the White House and some other Democrats were angry at the actor. The piece sparked a debate about whether celebrities should have such high-profile roles in a party that is already perceived as rich, coastal and out of touch.
Biden abdicated his responsibility by hiding his incapacities, Clooney told me, and “the media, in many ways, dropped the ball.”
Trump mocked Clooney on Truth Social, writing in part: “Clooney should get out of politics and go back to television. Movies never really worked for him!!!”
In a September interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Clooney quipped, in reply to Trump’s suggestion: “I will if he does.”
I noted that Trump lobbied to play the president in “Sharknado 3,” shortly before he began his real-life quest.
Clooney deadpanned: “All I can say on that subject is: He’s got a star on Hollywood Boulevard. I don’t.”
He shakes his head. “The part of this that’s crazy is that he’s the ‘man of the people.’ I cut tobacco for $3 an hour and sold insurance door-to-door and was uninsured for 10 years in my early career.”
‘Everything Made Sense’
Clooney arrived in New York in late January with Amal and his 7-year-old twins, Alexander and Ella. They have a place in England and a home in Kentucky near his parents, who just celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary. But their main residence is now a farm in France.
“Growing up in Kentucky, all I wanted to do was get away from a farm, get away from that life,” he said. “Now I find myself back in that life. I drive a tractor and all those things. It’s the best chance of a normal life.”
Though it is “tricky” to take a stroll through Central Park, he said he is enjoying the city, and being able to take his kids to school.
“My son’s favorite hero is Batman. I’m like, ‘You know I was Batman.’ He’s like, ‘Not really.’ I go, ‘You have no idea how right you are.’ If he knew that I was that Batman, he’d never have respect for me.” Clooney has apologized for his role as the Batman with nipples. “I was terrible in it,” he told GQ.
Recently they went bowling. “I haven’t been bowling in 30 years,” he said, laughing. “Oh my God! It’s an amazing thing, getting older, where you think you can still do stuff that you love.” Still, his kids make him feel younger. “We’re riding in the car to school and I make them listen to heavy metal because I just like it when they sing. My daughter has fallen in love with tragic songs. She loves Billie Eilish’s ‘What Was I Made For?’ and Harry Nilsson’s ‘Without You.’” But they’re happy kids, so I’m really lucky.”
Heslov said that Clooney has made sure to keep his old friends close, so he isn’t surrounded by sycophants. He added that Clooney’s twins have had a “profound” effect on him, making him “more comfortable” and helping him realize he should “take the time to enjoy things.”
Clooney is excited about his starring role in a new Noah Baumbach Netflix movie, “Jay Kelly,” in which he plays a movie star beloved by everyone but his kids.
He and Brad Pitt are about to do another “Oceans” film. In this one, Clooney said wryly, “It’s like we’re all too old to do the jobs we used to be able to do.”
He noted that he had a longer career as a leading man because there wasn’t a rush of them clamoring to bump his generation of stars off their thrones.
“It gave Pitt, myself and a few of us room to continue working,” he said. “Some guys have hit recently, like Glen Powell and stuff, where I go, ‘That guy’s going to have a really good career.’”
And how was the transition from glamorous bachelor to husband and father?
“I wasn’t really in the market for being a dad,” he said. “Then I met Amal and we fell in love. I have to say that, after that, everything made sense.”
He met her when she and a friend stopped by his house in Lake Como on the way to the Cannes Film Festival.
Before she arrived, his agent, Bryan Lourd, who had met her, said “I’m telling you, you’re going to marry her.” But he didn’t trust Lourd’s taste. “Then Amal walked in. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ Then I didn’t really think I’d have much of a chance with her because I was 17 years older and she seemed to have everything she needed.”
When they were both in London a few months later — he was scoring a movie and she was working on a treaty with the Muslim Brotherhood — he invited her to watch him score. “I thought, well, if you’re ever going to impress anybody, it’s with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road.”
Why isn’t he threatened by his wife’s success?
“I’m proud to be in the same room with her,” he said. “I’m proud to be her husband. I’m proud to be the father of kids with her.”
Clooney is conscious of time passing. “I had this conversation with Amal when I turned 60,” he said. “I said, ‘Look, I can still play full-court basketball. I can still run around. I can still do pretty much everything I did when I was 30. But in 30 years, I’m 90. That’s a real number. My dad just hit that. And there are some things you’re not doing no matter how many granola bars you eat. I told Amal, ‘We have to focus on the next 20, 25 years of making sure that we’re jamming in everything we can.’ Not just work, because no one at the end of their life goes, ‘God, I wish I worked more.’”
He got more contemplative. “There’s a thing about finding the person that you needed to find, particularly at a certain age, and everything from then on is easy.
“We renovated our house,” he continued. “Amal would go, ‘I want to paint this wall yellow.’ Well, if I was 27 years old and doing construction work, I would’ve been like, ‘Well, that’s a stupid color.’ But the truth of the matter is that at 60, you just go, ‘OK.’ There are so many things that would have caused friction that don’t.”
Clooney may not like yellow walls, but he’s staying sunny. “I got the brass ring,” he said. “It all worked out. If I go outside and I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I’d be OK.”
Content Source: www.nytimes.com