George Clooney grabs his phone and starts tapping feverishly. ‘Here’s my biggest problem in life,’ he says gravely, handing over the phone. A small girl in a swimsuit appears on the screen. ‘That’s my daughter, Ella.’
The adorable four-year old is a delight and bears a striking resemblance with her mother, Amal, a legal advocate. She is also a twin. But Clooney’s not worried about her brother, Alexander.
‘Boys at this age are easy,’ he says, dismissively. ‘Give ’em a stick and they start banging on things. They’re fine.’
But daughters? But daughters? ‘Ella woke up this morning with a sad face,’ he tells me. ‘I said: “Are you OK, Ella?” It turns out that her doll was missing a shoe. It was a very tragic morning for us and believe me, all you want in life is to find that shoe.’
Clooney told me that he enjoyed being at home in LA during the height of the pandemic with his family
We’re seated outside his suite at the Haymarket Hotel, on a spacious terrace so we don’t have to wear masks — though we’ve both been tested for you know what. (These days, each time I’m to interview a major star, the studios arrange for a nurse from an outfit called Your Doctor to visit my home of a morning, to give me a Covid test. What must my neighbours think?
And kids are on our mind, because we’ve been discussing the filmmaker’s latest movie, The Tender Bar. He directed the picture based on a memoir of American Pulitzer-prize winning journalist J.R. Moehringer.
It’s the story of how he and his mother (Lily Rabe) moved to the North Shore of Long Island when he was ten, to live with his grandparents and bar-owning Uncle Charlie, played with revitalised energy by Ben Affleck.
The denizens of the Dickens bar in Manhasset were a rough and ready bunch: p***heads, but scholars all. Clooney compares it to a mix-up of The Sopranos & Dead Poets Society.
J.R.’s Uncle Charlie is a father figure to him (played at age ten by Daniel Ranieri, Tye Sheridan); the Dickens regulars are his friends, helping with his homework and laughing about literature.
George Clooney grabs his phone and starts tapping feverishly. ‘Here’s my biggest problem in life,’ he says gravely, handing over the phone. The screen shows a small girl wearing a swimsuit. ‘That’s my daughter, Ella.’ The four-year-old is adorable, and bears a striking resemblance to her mother, the legal advocate Amal (right)
I wonder if Clooney would let his twins go to a bar with him.
‘If my kids aren’t able to handle themselves in situations that they’re less comfortable with, I think we would have failed them as parents,’ he says, firmly.
‘If you dropped my kids off at a place like the Tender Bar, they’d sit and ask questions about these guys and their families, I would hope. Ask people questions. It’s amazing what you can learn.’
Clooney told me that he enjoyed staying at home in LA during the height of the pandemic. ‘They weren’t old enough that I had to re-learn trigonometry,’ he jokes of the twins. He boasts that at one point he was doing ‘six loads of laundry a day — and I was doing the food, because my wife doesn’t cook’.
The actor is a handy man — a legacy of the lean years before he became famous. ‘I was broke a long time,’ he says; eking out a living doing odd jobs: selling ladies’ shoes, cutting tobacco for three dollars an hour, working as a carpenter and decorator.
Affleck, who is often down and out in Hollywood? After his acting career suffered a lot, Affleck began to climb again. ‘You go where people are offering you work,’ he says of his old friend, who directed Oscar-winning Argo for the production company run by Clooney and his business partner Grant Heslov.
Affleck starred in Good Will Hunting with Jennifer Lopez.
Affleck was still an effective director behind the camera, directing many great movies, including the aforementioned Argo, The Town, Gone Baby, Gone. ‘In doing those, he rediscovered acting,’ Clooney suggests.
Affleck (left), who is a Hollywood actor, is a good example of Hollywood’s down-and-out. After his acting career fell apart several years ago, Affleck was back on the rise.
He and Heslov sent Affleck the screenplay by William Monahan, with the warning that ‘this isn’t a film you get paid on’.
Affleck sent back a long email, explaining why he was going to do it, saying he didn’t care about the money. ‘And he was right! He doesn’t get offered parts like this. He has also aged into it appropriately, don’t you think?’
Yes, I do. The actor is a pleasure to watch; and it’s clear that this is no phoned-in performance. Despite this, I was struck by the fact that women in showbusiness are rarely given the same chance. Affleck is 49 — an age when a lot of actresses are told their careers are over.
Clooney leans forward. ‘I think that was because, for a long time, the people who were hiring them were men who’d probably gone through their first divorce and were now remarrying a 30-year-old woman.’
He mentions that eight of top ten box-office celebrities in the 1940s and 1950s were women. We both start naming names: Bette Davis; Katharine Hepburn; Barbara Stanwyck. . .
We’ve been discussing the filmmaker’s latest movie, The Tender Bar. The picture, which he helmed, is based upon a memoir by American Pulitzer Prize winner journalist J.R. Moehringer
‘They were huge stars, and got to work well into the Meryl Streep kind of age.’ (I’m only quoting what he said, Meryl!) ‘And then all of a sudden it was like you turned 40 and your career was over.’
Mercifully that’s changing, partly because the lines have blurred between television and film. ‘You see Nicole (Kidman) doing really interesting limited series,’ he says, by way of example.
He then slams as ‘pretty ridiculous’ the practice of aged male stars making movies with female leads half their age. ‘I haven’t done many romantic films, but usually I was working with someone age appropriate,’ he says, mentioning Michelle Pfeiffer (38 to his 35 when they shot One Fine Day in 1996) and Catherine Zeta Jones in Ocean’s Twelve (‘she was a little bit younger than me’ . . . 35 to Clooney’s 43 when that one was made in 2004).
Heslov interrupts his flow on gender fairness and joins us to discuss their array future productions, including Ticket To Paradise which he just started filming for Working Title in Australia with Julia Roberts (an aging-appropriate 54). Oh, and they have a daughter in the film. George will never tire of his responsibilities.
- The Tender Bar will be available in select cinemas starting December 17, and streams on Amazon Prime Video starting January 7.