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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?
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.
(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.”
047
Dr. Clooney will see you now:
ER