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Have they been unable to resolve conflicts on the set over the years?
Clooney was irritated by some disparaging comments Tarantino made in an interview with Deadline magazine’s Baz Bamingboye last year, a sentiment he echoed in a GQ interview published this week — even though no one noticed them at the time.
“George Clooney hasn’t been able to draw audiences in a long time,” QT declared, essentially arguing that, unlike Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt, his double act Once Upon a Time in Hollywood These days, Clooney no longer has the credentials to be a true movie star.
He also challenged everyone to name one of Clooney’s hit films so far this century.
Failure to accomplish this challenge would mean temporarily forgetting the hugely successful Ocean’s Eleven (2001), its two sequels, or Gravity (2013) – even if that was primarily a Sandra Bullock movie, not a Clooney one.
Other than that, Tarantino does have a point.
Clooney’s final 20 years haven’t done much to sustain the stardom he enjoyed at his peak. In fact, they saw him move away from his good friend Pitt’s full-time, carefully planned acting career.
You could argue that he adds a lot to a movie, not just a starring role. He hasn’t been nominated for an Oscar for a movie since Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011) — which was terrible, by the way, but was critically acclaimed. (He won Best Supporting Actor for Syriana, but that was in 2006.)
There was an underlying feeling that he was just putting his feet up, rather than really working on it.
His last leading role, in the moderately successful but thoroughly bland Ticket to Paradise (2022), is a case in point.
The film, a remarriage comedy about his reunion with Ocean’s Eleven actress Julia Roberts, looks like the opposite of hard work. It’s a beach vacation disguised as a gift to fans.
Such cozy excursions were a frequent feature of Cary Grant as he approached 60, when he made films like A Touch of Mink and Charade — suit-and-tie entertainments that marked the end of his days as a romantic leading man.
Grant is entering the age of political elder, tanned and exuding wealth. Like Clooney, he has cultivated an image of cool and collected cool, everyone’s favorite dinner party guest – but he is always funniest when that facade is revealed.
Whatever happens, I doubt you’ll deny that Tarantino is as much a movie star as Cary Grant.
Or Roberts — as he made clear in that interview — or Harrison Ford.
So why is Clooney different? It must have something to do with him being overworked.
Other actors never took on other roles behind the scenes that would diminish their undisputed movie star status.
Clooney, on the other hand, co-wrote four of the films he directed and served as a producer on seven of them.
Through his production company, Smokehouse Pictures, he has also found homes for some of the projects he didn’t direct, including the upcoming remake of the French political drama The Agency. Investigation Bureaustarring Michael Fassbender.
But Clooney, whose tequila business has reportedly boosted his fortune to $500 million, has not appeared in three of his last four films: Lost in Town (2017), Tender Minds (2021) and Boys on the Boat (2023).
Instead, he’s cast stars like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in the lead roles. In essence, he’s gone out of his way to delegate the lead duties to other people – and that, more than anything else, proves the point of Tarantino’s statement.
Perhaps settling down is part of his retreat. In 2014, Clooney married human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin, which suddenly made him look like a serious, sophisticated man, not a frivolous playboy.
But their shared philanthropic work, rather than risky films, is the outward manifestation of this.
If Clooney is growing tired of acting, that might explain why he’s shifted so much of his energy toward politics lately.
In June, he hosted a star-studded fundraiser for Biden’s presidential campaign in Los Angeles, attended by Roberts, Barbra Streisand, Jack Black and many others.
Just one month later, after the president’s infamous debate performance rang many alarm bells, Clooney became one of the most prominent voices encouraging Biden to step down. The New York Times Contains a killer and much-quoted line – “But the one battle he can’t win is the battle against time”.
The letter ended by urging Biden to resign to help save democracy. Ten days later, Biden resigned.
Does Clooney’s behavior here indicate that he is a man with ambitions to run for public office in the future? Ronald Reagan was not actually a movie star anymore, as his last acting credit was in 1964—the same year he gave his famous speech for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign.
The concept of a “real” movie star is pure and apolitical.
Tarantino won’t include character actors on his lists, and infamously excludes actors from Marvel movies. Clooney may be sad because he had to overcome the stigma of being a “TV actor” during the ER era — he succeeded while the likes of David Caruso failed — but he’s still not considered a “movie star” in Tarantino’s eyes.
Then we have to consider the issue of streaming: even if Clooney and Pitt are currently promotingDespite starring two of the most famous actors alive, Wolfe had only a token one-week theatrical run before being hastily moved to AppleTV+.
Are streaming stars still movie stars? Not like Bette Davis or Steve McQueen. Overall, the number of streaming stars seems to be decreasing.
Although Clooney still has all the trappings of a star—disembarking arm-in-arm with Amal at the European Film Festival—his current relationship with movies is not as close as it might seem.
He will most likely not be starring in the film himself, but will be busy perfecting the production design, redrafting the sets, or getting all the extras.
His relationship to screen stardom is somewhat implicit, as if he has some insecurities about maintaining it, or finds the roles that suit him less interesting than projects with other people.
Whether intentional or not, his weariness as “movie star George Clooney” has completely destroyed our expectations of him.
Maybe one day, “George Clooney, Democratic Candidate” will bring them back to life.
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