STACK#127 May 2016

TELEVISION George Clooney was a regular on the small screen for over a decade before he graduated to the big. Prior to his breakthrough role as Dr. Doug Ross on Emmy-winning medical drama series ER in 1994, Clooney landed recurring parts in series like The Facts of Life (1985-87), Roseanne (1988-91), Baby Talk (1991) and Sisters (1993-94). He has also appeared in episodes of The Golden Girls (1987), Friends (1995) and South Park (1997). “Had I not got the Thursday night ten o’clock slot at ER , if they’d put us on Friday night, then I wouldn’t have a film career. That’s luck, not my own genius, though I like to think it was,” he says. Curiously, his first major TV role was in the similarly named sitcom E/R (1984-85). Coincidence, or destiny?

(2007). The first film, a remake of the 1960 Frank Sinatra classic, was Clooney’s first big commercial hit. “I’m a hybrid,” he notes. “I succeed in both worlds. I hope that selling out on Ocean’s Eleven is not such a big deal. The trade-off is, I get to go make something uncommercial that will probably lose money.” That uncommercial film that lost money was Welcome to Collinwood (2002), a crime caper co- produced by Clooney and Soderbergh, with the former also appearing as a wheelchair-bound safecracker. “Steven and I have a great relationship inside the studio system. We make the kinds of films we want and commercial films at the same time,” he explains. Soderbergh and Clooney’s working partnership continued with Solaris (2002), a streamlined remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Russian sci-fi epic, with the actor playing a psychologist confronting existential demons aboard a space station – a role originally tagged for Daniel Day-Lewis. Having worked with the Coens and regularly with Soderbergh, it wasn’t surprising that Clooney decided to direct. His debut behind the camera was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), a biopic of TV game show creator Chuck Barris, who claimed to work as a CIA hitman on the side. Despite an accomplished job by Clooney, a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman ( Being John Malkovich ) and a manic performance by Sam Rockwell, the film was another box office failure for the actor-turned-filmmaker. “But I can take it,” Clooney admitted. “Most of the films I’ve done haven’t done particularly well. I’m surprised I’m continuing to work.” After reteaming with the Coens for Intolerable Cruelty (2003), Clooney returned to the director’s chair in 2005 to helm Good Night, and Good Luck. , a black and white drama depicting TV journalist Edward Murrow’s grilling of Senator Joseph McCarthy. A hit with critics, the film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Director. Stephen Gaghan’s political thriller Syriana (2005) was another highly decorated film during awards season. Clooney gained 35 pounds to play CIA operative Robert Barnes, and received the Best Supporting Actor Oscar and Golden Globe for his performance. He reunited with Soderbergh the following year for the Casablanca -like ‘40s noir thriller The Good German (2006), in which he played a US war correspondent involved in a murder mystery in post- war Berlin. As the eponymous legal fixer of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (2007), Clooney delivered one of his finest performances and received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor – but lost to Daniel Day- Lewis’s tour de force in There Will Be Blood . “Clooney brings a slick, ruthless force to the title role,” noted Roger Ebert. His next job as director was the period pro-football film Leatherheads (2008), an homage to Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1940s. He also starred and contributed rewrites to the 17-year-old script, but was denied a writing credit by the WGA and consequently resigned his status with the union. Clooney’s third film with the Coens was the wacky comedy Burn After Reading (2008), playing a womanising US Marshal amongst an ensemble cast in zany overdrive. “I’ve done three films with [the Coens] and they call it my trilogy of idiots,” Clooney says. Up in the Air (2009) is the story of a corporate

downsizer who spends his days flying around the US firing people. With Clooney firmly in mind for the part, writer-director Jason Reitman was poised to revise the character for Steve Martin should George decline. “If you’re going to make a movie about a guy who fires people for a living and you still want to like him, that actor better be damn charming and I don’t think there’s a more charming actor alive than George Clooney. I was very lucky he said yes.” Clooney would also be grateful: he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. Military satire The MenWho Stare at Goats (2009) – concerning the US Army’s attempts to harness psychic powers – is one of Clooney’s more underrated films. The actor pulls double duty here as a bug-eyed psychic spy and a co-producer. In Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animated version of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Clooney provided the voice of the titular chicken thief. “We were out in the middle of nowhere, on people’s farms, and doing sound effects and rolling around in the fields – so it was fun to do,” he recalls. The ‘10s “I doubt anybody gets taken seriously for very long. I’ll be on some reality show in about six years going, ‘Hey, I had a great year in 2006’.” Clooney added to his rogues gallery in 2010, playing an assassin in Anton Cobijn’s The American . This good looking but leisurely paced thriller proved a hard slog, even for Clooney completists. Another of Clooney’s best films as director is the political drama The Ides of March (2011), in which he stars as a Democratic presidential candidate with a skeleton in his closet that could derail his campaign. “I would call this movie a political thriller. I wouldn’t think of it necessarily as a political movie,” Clooney explains. “It walks that line of picking on everybody. If it is a political movie, it’s a political movie without pressing a specific agenda, and that was what was important to us.” That same year he received his third Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011). Clooney was attracted to the role of a flawed family man; a welcome change from bank robbers, suits and Coen ‘idiots’. “As a Hawaiian father of two negotiating complex emotions while his wife lies comatose after a boating accident, George Clooney reveals yet another layer of himself,” noted Variety critic Peter DeBruge. Clooney’s biggest hit at the box office to date would be Gravity (2013), his first picture since 2000’s The Perfect Storm to pass the $100 million mark in the US. Once again it was ‘script first’ that attracted him to the film, and also the opportunity to work with star Sandra Bullock. “Sandy and I have been good friends for a very long time, but we never found the right vehicle for us to do something together,” he says. Clooney’s most recent film as both star and director was the The Monuments Men (2014), which blended shades of Ocean’s Eleven with old school World War II adventures like The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape . “In those movies, you fell in love with the characters and the actors as much as the story,” he says. “Actually, we never really fully thought of this as a war film – it was a heist film.”

Dr. Clooney will see you now: ER

TOMORROWLAND We’ll next see Clooney in Disney’s secrecy-shrouded science fiction spectacular, playing an inventor who, along with teenager Britt Robertson, is whisked away through time and space to “a secret place where nothing is impossible”. Director Brad Bird’s involvement is a huge plus: he made The Incredibles and the best M:I movie, Ghost Protocol , and the trailer hints that a visual feast will be served. “You wanted to see Tomorrowland? Here it comes...” promises Clooney’s character. In cinemas May 21, to be exact.

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