by George Clooney is many things. Husband and father of twins. Director of nine films. Human rights advocate and Democratic fundraiser. A gold-plated A-list celebrity you wouldn’t be surprised to find on the cover of GQ, Esquire, you name it.
A movie star, though? No more. Quentin Tarantino, who co-starred with him at the start of his film career in the vampire action comedy From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), is of the opinion that Clooney’s psychotic brother is similar – something that annoys Clooney.
Were there tensions that they never resolved during all these years? Some disparaging remarks made by Tarantino, in an interview last year with Baz Bamingboye for Deadline, led to the disdain he showed for Clooney in the GQ interview published this week – even if no one else paid much attention to them at the time.
“It’s been a long time since George Clooney drew anyone to an audience,” QT announced, essentially arguing that, unlike Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt, his double act from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, didn’t qualify. Clooney is really a movie star these days. He also challenged anyone who met Clooney to name this side of the millennium.
Failing that challenge is to forget the moment when Ocean’s 11 (2001), the two sequels, or Gravity (2013) – even if that must very much be a Sandra Bullock film, were very successful. not a Clooney movie.
Beyond that, however, Tarantino has a point. Clooney hasn’t done much in the last 20 years to build on Ocean’s peak stardom. In fact, they’ve seen him eschew a carefully-strategized full-time acting career, say, his friend Pitt.
You could argue that he loved movies while he was there more than just starring in them. Nothing since Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011) – terrible, by the way, but famous – has come close to earning him an Oscar nomination. (He won Best Supporting Actor for Syriana, but that was way back in 2006.) He has a basic sense of putting his feet up, without really trying.
His last leading role, in the moderately successful Ticket to Paradise (2022), is a case in point, and was completely bland. The film, a remarriage comedy reuniting with Ocean’s crush Julia Roberts, seemed like the opposite of hard work. It was a beach holiday in disguise as a gift to his fans.
This cozy was the kind of thing that Cary Grant often starred in as he approached the age of 60, when he made the likes of A Touch of Mink and Charade – a jacket and tie entertainment that gave time to his years as a romantic pioneer. Grant was coming into his elder statesmanship, with a tan and an aura of peachy wealth. Like Clooney, he maintained an unassuming persona as everyone’s favorite dinner party guest – but he was always very interesting when that facade became ruffled.
I doubt if Tarantino would deny that Cary Grant was a movie star, as he might. Or Roberts, for that matter – as he expressly mentions in that interview – or Harrison Ford. So why is Clooney different? He must be doing something to stretch himself so thin.
Those other actors did not dilute their unassailable status as movie stars by taking on other roles behind the camera. Clooney, on the other hand, co-wrote four of the films he directed, and produced seven of them. Through his production company, Smokehouse Pictures, he also gets a spot for projects he’s not even directing, including The Agency, a remake of the French political drama The Bureau, with Michael Fassbender.
Although Clooney has reportedly grown his tequila business to $500 million, he has not acted in three of his last four films: Suburbicon (2017), The Tender Bar (2021) and The Boys in the Boat (2023). Instead, he cast the likes of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck to carry them. Basically, he has gone out of his way to delegate the star function to others – and this, above all, is what gives Tarantino’s statements the ring of validity.
The step back may have coincided with settling down. Clooney’s marriage to human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin in 2014 suddenly made him seem like a serious guy to the world, no longer a frivolous boy. But their charity work together, rather than a type of risk, was a clear sign of this. If Clooney has grown increasingly bored of the acting lark, it may also help explain why so much of his energy has recently been diverted into the political arena.
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 more. A month later, after an impassioned presidential debate performance that set off so many alarm bells, Clooney became one of the most prominent voices urging Biden to resign. His work for the New York Times contained a much-quoted killer line – “But the only battle he can’t win is the fight against time”. He ended by urging Biden to help save democracy by resigning. Ten days later he was gone.
Was Clooney’s behavior here that of a man with potential ambitions to run for office in the future? Ronald Reagan effectively retired from being a movie star with his last acting credit in 1964 – the same year he gave a speech at Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign.
The concept of the “real” movie star has purity, and is apolitical. Tarantino wouldn’t include character actors on his list, and he infamously eliminated the cast members of Marvel movies. Perhaps it lies in Clooney’s plight that he has had to overcome the stigma of being a “TV actor” since the days of ER – followed by the failures of the likes of David Caruso – and still not considered a “movie star”. it in Tarantino’s eyes. .
And then we have to consider the issue of streaming: even the film that Clooney and Pitt are currently promoting together, Wolfs, despite the fact that two of the most famous actors are live stars, is getting a theatrical release a very significant week before it is transferred to AppleTV +. Are streaming stars worth movie stars? Not in the same way that Bette Davis or Steve McQueen once were. The count feels like it’s decreasing overall.
Clooney’s current relationship with the cinema is not as close as it could be, for all the trappings of stardom – getting off boats at European film festivals, hand in hand with Amal – he keeps. Instead of showing himself in films, it is as likely that he was busy finishing the production design, re-drafting scenes, or enjoying all the extras.
There’s something regressive about his relationship with screen stardom, as if he’s uncomfortable doing so, or if the kind of roles that suit him aren’t as interesting as the projects he can take on with others. Consciously or not, his boring air of “George Clooney, movie star” has taken away our expectations from him along the way. Maybe “George Clooney, Democratic nominee” will bring them back to life one day.
