George Clooney, pictured during a chat show appearance. Photo / Supplied
OPINION
George Clooney is many things.
A husband and father of twins. A director of nine films. A human rights advocate and Democratic fundraiser. A gold-plated A-list celebrity you would still be unsurprised to find on the cover of GQ, Esquire.
A movie star, though? Not any more.
Such – to Clooney’s outspoken annoyance – is the opinion of Quentin Tarantino, who co-starred with him at the very beginning of his film career in the vampire action-comedy From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), playing Clooney’s psychotic brother.
Were there on-set tensions they’ve never resolved over all these years?
Some dismissive remarks Tarantino made, in an interview last year with Baz Bamingboye for Deadline, have caused Clooney niggling offence that he has voiced in a GQ interview published this week – even if no one else paid them very much attention at the time.
“It’s been a long while since George Clooney has drawn anybody to an audience,” QT declared, essentially arguing that, unlike Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt, his double act from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Clooney didn’t truly qualify as a movie star these days.
He further challenged anyone to name a Clooney hit this side of the millennium.
To fail that challenge is to have momentarily forgotten about the lavishly successful Ocean’s 11 (2001), its two sequels, or Gravity (2013) – even if that has to count as very much Sandra Bullock’s film, not Clooney’s.
Beyond those, though, Tarantino does have a point.
Clooney’s last 20 years have not done a great deal to sustain the stardom of his Ocean’s peak. Indeed, they have seen him duck away from the full-time, carefully strategised acting career of, say, his good buddy Pitt.
You might argue that he has graced films with his presence more than strictly starring in them. Nothing since Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011) – awful, by the way, but acclaimed – has come close to earning him an Oscar nomination. (He won Best Supporting Actor for Syriana, but that was way back in 2006.)
There’s an underlying feeling of him putting his feet up, not really trying.
His last leading role, in the moderately successful, entirely bland Ticket to Paradise (2022), is a case in point.
The film, a comedy of remarriage reuniting him with his Ocean’s squeeze Julia Roberts, looked like the opposite of hard work. It was a beach holiday disguised as a gift to their fans.
This cosy jaunt was the kind of thing Cary Grant often starred in as he neared 60, when he made the likes of A Touch of Mink and Charade – jacket-and-tie entertainments which called time on his years as a romantic lead.
Grant was entering his elder statesman era, with an equally peachy tan and aura of wealth. Like Clooney, he had cultivated a smoothly unflappable persona as everyone’s favourite dinner-party guest – but was always most interesting when that façade got ruffled.
I doubt you would find Tarantino denying that Cary Grant was a movie star, come what may.
Or Roberts, for that matter – as he explicitly points out in that interview – or Harrison Ford.
So why is Clooney different? It must be something to do with stretching himself so thin.
Those other actors never diluted their unassailable status as movie stars by taking other roles behind the camera.
Clooney, on the other hand, involved himself in co-writing four of the films he has directed, and produced seven of them.
Through his production company, Smokehouse Pictures, he also finds a home for projects he’s not even directing, including The Agency, a forthcoming remake of French political drama The Bureau, to star Michael Fassbender.
But Clooney, whose tequila business has reportedly swollen his fortune to $500 million, has not acted in three of his own last four films: Suburbicon (2017), The Tender Bar (2021) and The Boys in the Boat (2023).
Instead, he has cast the likes of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck to carry them. Essentially, he’s gone out of his way to delegate the function of starring to others – and it’s this, more than anything, that gives Tarantino’s remarks the ring of validity.
The stepping back may have coincided with settling down. Clooney’s marriage to the human-rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin in 2014 suddenly made him seem like a serious man of the world, no longer a frivolous playboy.
But it’s their charitable work together, rather than risk-taking cinema, that has been the outward sign of this.
If Clooney has become progressively more bored of the acting lark, it may also help explain why so many of his energies lately have been diverted into the political sphere.
In June, he hosted a star-studded fundraiser for Biden’s presidential campaign, a gala in Los Angeles attended by Roberts, Barbra Streisand, Jack Black and many others.
Just a month later, after the President’s infamous debate performance that rang so many alarm bells, Clooney became one of the most prominent voices encouraging Biden to step down. His op-ed for the New York Times contained a much-quoted killer line – “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time”.
It ended by urging Biden to help save democracy by quitting. Ten days later he was gone.
Was Clooney’s behaviour here that of a man with possible ambitions to run for future office? Ronald Reagan effectively ceased being a movie star with his last acting credit in 1964 – the same year he gave a celebrated speech for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign.
There’s a purity to the concept of the “true” movie star, and it’s apolitical.
Tarantino wouldn’t include character actors in his list, and infamously ruled out the cast members of Marvel films. It perhaps sticks in Clooney’s craw that he had to overcome the stigma of being a “TV actor” from the ER days – succeeding where the likes of David Caruso failed – and yet still doesn’t get deemed a “movie star” in Tarantino’s eyes.
And then we must consider the streaming issue: even the film that Clooney and Pitt are currently promoting together, Wolfs, despite starring two of the most famous actors alive, is getting a very token, week-long theatrical release before being hustled onto AppleTV+.
Are streaming stars even movie stars? Not in the same way that Bette Davis or Steve McQueen once were. The count feels like it’s dwindling overall.
Clooney’s current relationship with cinema is less intimate than it might seem, for all the trappings of stardom – stepping off boats at European film festivals, arm-in-arm with Amal – that he retains.
Rather than showing up in films himself, he is just as likely to have busied himself finessing the production design, redrafting scenes, or charming all the extras.
There’s something recessive about his relationship with stardom on screen, as if he’s somewhat uneasy living up to it, or doesn’t find the kind of roles he’s suited for as interesting as the projects he can cast with other people.
Consciously or not, his air of boredom with “George Clooney, movie star” has dismantled our expectations of him along the way.
Maybe “George Clooney, Democratic nominee” will one day bring them back to life.
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