George Clooney covers the latest issue of Esquire, all to promote his latest movie, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Clooney plays a movie star who wonders if he really showed up for the people in his life. I’ve seen some horrible reviews of the film, but Clooney has enough money and power to ensure that Jay Kelly still has “Oscar buzz.” For me, Clooney is permanently sh-tlisted after what he said and did last year (and this year) about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. This Esquire interview emphasizes yet again that Clooney’s meddling and ratf–king was always just a political abstraction for him, he’s not actually living under the fascist conditions he helped facilitate. He lives full-time in England, France and Italy now. But of course he still has sh-t to say about American politics in this interview:
Performing Good Night, and Good Luck on Broadway: “I was really nervous, as an actor, which I hadn’t been in a long time… I mean, part of it was strictly age related. As you get older—I’m sixty-four—and as you get older, it doesn’t matter how many granola bars you eat; your brain starts to lock up. I had all these long monologues, and I was afraid of blowing my lines. So every single night for one hundred performances, I would do the whole play in the dressing room before I went onstage. I was so terrified.”
His twins are well-adjusted & they’re being raised in France: “Yeah, we’re very lucky. You know, we live on a farm in France. A good portion of my life growing up was on a farm, and as a kid I hated the whole idea of it. But now, for them, it’s like—they’re not on their iPads, you know? They have dinner with grown-ups and have to take their dishes in. They have a much better life. I was worried about raising our kids in L. A., in the culture of Hollywood. I felt like they were never going to get a fair shake at life. France—they kind of don’t give a sh-t about fame. I don’t want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don’t want them being compared to somebody else’s famous kids.”
He came to fatherhood so late: “The only thing I feel lucky about is that I’m so much older that the idea that my son would be compared to me is pretty unlikely, because by the time he actually will have done anything, I’m gonna be gumming my bread.”
America will get through the bad times: “I do believe we get through these things, and if you think back to the times that have been really bad in the country—we’ve had them. I think ’68 was as bad as we could have had. Every city in the United States was on fire and rioting, and the capital was surrounded by armed guards to protect themselves. We killed Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy that year. There was the Tet Offensive…So if you look at it, you go, we’ve been in bad places before. Certainly the Civil War. So we’re going to get through it, but a lot of damage is going to be done along the way because of where we are. And it is heartbreaking to see. And Democrats are gonna have to get their act together— And they will. Coming out of the Iraq war and all that is what brought us Obama—brought us a really good leader. And we’re gonna need it.”
Whether he will ever write another NYT op-ed about a Democrat again: “I don’t think so. I think people have heard enough from me. I wasn’t doing it to, you know—I was doing it because I’d been a personal witness to things, and I also, quite honestly—[Clooney was interrupted].”
He did cocaine in the 1980s. “Eighty-two, I tried—I did blow and stuff. I used to make jokes about how I did too many drugs, but the truth is, it was never a big issue for me at all. And look, there was an episode of Taxi where they’re all doing blow. At the time, it was like, No, this is not like heroin. It’s not addictive. But then it was like, Oh, well, it’s actually pretty f–king bad. Plus, it was all cut with mannitol. The baby laxative. Everybody would do a line and then take a s–t.”
He’s always been a booze guy: “I’ve had periods where, I wouldn’t say it was a problem—I never woke up and drank or anything. But I’d have runs where I’d get pretty toasty every night.”
I think Clooney and the podbros say sh-t like “we’ve been through bad times before, we’ll get through them” to avoid taking responsibility for their ratf-cking. Oh, so NOW we should all get along, NOW we should come together? Where were those sentiments when we should have come together to stop this Trump authoritarianism from happening in the first place? Why hasn’t Clooney written a NYT op-ed about Trump’s age and dementia, you know? Where is the 24-7 nitpicking of Trump’s policies from that crew? Anyway, Clooney mostly ran back his greatest hits in this interview and it was just sad. He’s too old to function as a movie star anymore, he needs to step down. We can hold a primary to elect the next Clooney.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images and Backgrid. Cover courtesy of Esquire.
