Actor George Clooney told director Noah Baumbach that he was lucky that Clooney said yes to starring in his new film, Jay Kelly. Only three people on Earth could play the role. The tragicomedy is about film star Jay Kelly, a man in his mid-sixties who is confronted with his life choices. His eldest daughter is estranged from him, his youngest would rather spend the summer with friends than with him. Kelly decides to secretly follow his daughter through Europe. He does this, like everything in his life, together with his heavily paid entourage, consisting of his extremely loyal manager (Adam Sandler) and others.
NRC has a short video call with Clooney and, as is often the case with Hollywood stars, that conversation is ‘paired‘: with co-star Adam Sandler. The two are quite attuned to each other and slightly corny, possibly due to giving many interviews.
Baumbach (Frances Ha, Marriage Story) wanted a real movie star for the role of Kelly, someone with whom the audience has a history – just like the people the character encounters during his journey. Then you end up with Clooney. The American has also been a producer and director in recent decades, but is best known for his acting. In 1994, at the age of 33, he was catapulted into movie stardom by his role as the passionate, rebellious and attractive pediatrician Dr. Doug Ross in hospital series ER. After Clooney played Batman in Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin (1997), a film that he considers so bad that he today feels ‘physical pain’ when rewatching it, he started to think more carefully about the film roles he took on. It ultimately led to a remarkably diverse oeuvre for Hollywood.
Clooney starred in chic popcorn entertainment as the Ocean’s Elevenheist films and in quality thrillers and comedies that earned him Oscar nominations and wins (Michael Clayton, Up in the Air, Syriana). But he also didn’t shy away from playing an idiot in absurd Coen Brothers films like O Brother, Where Art Thou? or Burn After Reading.
George Clooney in ‘Jay Kelly’.
Photo Peter Mountain/Netflix
The trick to not getting stuck as an actor is to open the door to a variety of films from the start, Clooney explains. And then actively keep that door open so that people know that you play different types of roles. Sandler adds that Jack Nicholson once advised him to do “a little one” every now and then. “When I asked what he meant by that, he replied ‘a small role in a film’. Because when they start casting and only have small roles for you, people say: oh, but he has always played those.”
Sacrifices for your career
The film shatters the myth that you can become a movie star by chance and build a brilliant career. You have to be extremely ambitious, willing to make mistakes and give up things. What have Clooney and Sandler given up? Clooney, joking to Sandler: “You gave up your basketball career, right? You were supposed to be a professional, but just lacked height and skills. No seriously, did you give up anything?” Sandler: “Maybe time with the people I love. But hey, that doesn’t mean anything.” Clooney, now more serious: “You give up things, of course. But anyone who pursues a career in a field misses things in life that they would rather not have missed. But I think for both of us we have drawn the lottery and feel blessed. Of course we have made sacrifices, but not the same as the character.”
In the film, Jay Kelly has not managed to combine his family with a Hollywood life. Clooney, who for decades was one of the world’s most eligible bachelors and whose dating life received at least as much attention as his acting, married British-Lebanese human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin in 2014. The couple has eight-year-old twins. They raise them partly far from Hollywood, on a farm in France. Clooney also takes things a bit easier in his work.
Clooney: “I’m 64, my career has worked out well, so I can afford things. We still live in LA, but they go to school in France, where it is forbidden to take pictures of them. I couldn’t have done that at 30, when I was pursuing my career. I started having children late, that was the timing that worked for me. The only disadvantage is that you are old while raising children.”
Charisma
Clooney is sometimes called one of the last movie stars: an actor who loves the camera no matter what he does. Jay Kellydirector Noah Baumbach previously said that what struck him about the big stars he’s worked with, as well as Clooney, is that everything they do looks like it takes no effort at all. While, according to the director, in reality Clooney works very hard. That they slip into a role as if they were simply putting on a costume is why some stars are said, wrongly according to Baumbach, to merely play variations of themselves. A criticism that is also sometimes heard about Clooney, with his relaxed attitude and self-mockery, both on and off screen.
What Baumbach himself found interesting was seeing someone like Clooney play a character his own age. Many American film stars do not want that and do everything they can to maintain the illusion of eternal youth. In the film we also see Jay Kelly busy with a marker to color his gray eyebrows. The real Clooney doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. “There are only a few options: either you accept that you’re getting older and you try to keep working in an industry you love. Or you fight it and the industry leaves you behind because they really won’t let you play the same roles as when you were 35. Everyone knows I’m 64, I’ve been around Hollywood for 40 years.”
As his examples in the film industry, Clooney often mentions actors such as Paul Newman and Gregory Peck. Why exactly? “They did great work, but they also stood with both feet in the world. Their celebrity did not prevent them from giving their opinion and they dared to stick their neck out.” Does Clooney himself feel an obligation to use his celebrity for things outside the film? He has some influence within the Democratic Party; for example, he wrote a controversial opinion piece in the summer of 2024 The New York Times calling on Joe Biden to resign.
“I grew up in the sixties. Especially in the United States you had to deal with the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War. If you did not make your voice heard, you did not participate in society. I try to inform myself and then make myself heard. That is how I was raised. My father and mother expected that from me and still expect it.”
Also read
George Clooney and the Toll of Fame in ‘Jay Kelly’
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