George Clooney is such an international celebrity, the latest magazine cover story about him may get barely a second notice in his home state of Kentucky. But his Kentuckyness and his humanity come through in the October-November issue of Esquire, in a profile by Ryan D’Agostino, articles editor of the men’s magazine, who got a seven-hour interview with Clooney at his home on Lake Como in northern Italy.
We learn that Clooney had stage fright about his recent turn on Broadway, that he has had to adjust to recurring pain from a moviemaking injury 20 years ago, and that he is an amateur mechanic with skills born of being raised in a small farming community and being a hand-to-mouth actor until his early 30s.
“I’m so handy,” he says. “You have no idea.”
Esquire Editor Michael Sebastian calls Clooney “an endangered species in Hollywood: a movie star who strikes the rare balance of being a box-office draw and a two-time Academy Award winner. He’s handsome, stylish and well-mannered – traits that seem to connect him to an older, more glamorous Hollywood. . . . He’s talented but doesn’t take himself too seriously. He’s fearless without being cavalier. He’s funny.”
All true, and all attributable to the influence of his family, including parents Nick and Nina Clooney of Augusta and his late aunt, singer-actress Rosemary Clooney, whom he credits with teaching him how to handle celebrity. His beau ideal is Nick, a longtime Cincinnati TV anchorman who got his radio start in Lexington, where George was born.
Nick was a big part of the inspiration for “Good Night, and Good Luck,” the 2005 film that Clooney directed and co-authored about mid-century CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow. This year he adapted it to the stage for a three-week run on Broadway, and “I was really nervous, as an actor, which I hadn’t been in a long time,” he tells D’Agostino, because he was afraid of forgetting lines. “Actually, there’s something fun about being 64 years old and not being sure you’re going to get it right and risking real humiliation.”
Having fun and finding humor seem to be fundamental elements of Clooney’s personality, and perhaps keys to his success and his graceful maturation into an international icon.
“He could pass for 50, but he’s getting toward 70, and 70 just seems too old for George Clooney to be,” D’Agostino writes, adding later, “He’s suspended between youth and age. His wife is 47. His father’s 91. His children are 8. . . . He worries about having kids who will forever be the children of famous parents. As he sometime does in serious moments, he makes an unfunny point in a funny way. He says, ‘The only thing I feel lucky about [the age difference] is that I’m so much older that the idea my son would be compared to me is pretty unlikely, because by the time he will actually have done anything, I’m going to be gumming my bread.’”
Playing key supporting roles in this stream-of-notebook article are twins Alexander and Ella. After their first of many appearances, he says, “Yeah, we’ve very lucky.” He is married to Amal Alamuddin Clooney, a leading international human-rights lawyer; nine years ago, they started the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which among other things honors people and groups who have fought for justice at great personal risk. The latest awards were made last week.
The magazine article has relatively little about politics, touching only lightly on Clooney’s opinion piece last summer that help push Joe Biden aside and the current challenges.
“We’ve been in bad places before,” such as the Civil War and 1968, he says. “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 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 going to need it.”
There’s no hint in the interview that Clooney might become a political candidate. The family appears to have soured on elective politics after Nick’s disappointing race for Congress in 2004. George is clearly career-focused, and in his latest film he is “as good as he’s ever been, maybe the best he’s ever been,” D’Agostino reports.
Clooney has the title role in “Jay Kelly,” playing “an aging movie star whose life might not be as great as he thinks it is,” as D’Agostino puts it, letting readers interpret the irony as they will. Kelly is a Kentuckian, too, but that was in the script before he saw it, Clooney says. Maybe writer-producer-director Noah Baumach did that as a come-on to Clooney, who publicly treasures his roots.
The most touching lines in the article report that Nick and Nina were “too frail” to go see George on stage, and that was one reason he arranged for one performance to be broadcast live on CNN, a first for Broadway.
“Nick had some family over and they watched it,” D’Agostino reports. “At the end, when Clooney delivered Morrow’s closing monologue and the screen went to black, his father stood up, right there in the living room, and saluted the TV.”