George Clooney Is Starting to Feel His Age
On the cusp of 60, the 'Midnight Sky' star and father of 3-year-old twins is still charming audiences
George Clooney was never young. I mean, yes, George Clooney the person was once young, trotting alongside his newscaster father to beauty pageants in Indiana and fixing pipes as the mullet-topped 24-year-old handyman on The Facts of Life. The George Clooney we know, though, didn't materialize in our collective consciousness until the first episode of ER, when he was 33. In most roles, he's played someone older than his age, wearing sharp suits or scrubs, uniforms or space suits. He's talked about the atrocities in Darfur, had dinners with Barack Obama and Walter Cronkite.
But George Clooney was also never old. He was a bachelor. Rode a motorcycle. Had a weekly basketball game. Created his own tequila. Owned a pet pig. Played practical jokes. He was always the same age, the bubble exactly in the middle of a spirit level measuring from man to guy.
But.
George Clooney had neck surgery last fall, after a scooter accident in 2018, and when the doctors were examining him, they found some arthritis. It was a bad accident — you can go online to watch video from a hotel security cam and see Clooney launched at about 70 miles per hour, his helmet shattering a car's windshield, his body cannonballed out of his own shoes, his mouth full of what he thought were shattered teeth but was actually glass. Even though he's still at his high school weight and recovered quickly, and he's been in motorcycle accidents before, he has kids and a wife now, so he won't be riding ever again. And basketball — that's too tough now, too.
For 10 years Clooney has declined offers to be on the cover of this magazine, though he did consider doing it as a joke when he turned 50. “I wanted to do a funny bit, which would be Sexiest Man Still Alive. I would have done some funny picture, like with a walker,” he says over Zoom from the screening room of his Los Angeles house.
"Now that I'm about to turn 60, it's not as funny,” he adds, running a hand through his cropped more-salt-than-pepper hair. And when AARP The Magazine's Movies for Grownups awarded him the Career Achievement Award, he surrendered: “I always say to my dad, ‘I'm middle-aged.’ And he goes, ‘You know a lot of 120-year-olds?’ ”
I'm 49 years and 6 months old — just a short time away from receiving that fateful red-and-white letter to join AARP and start getting this magazine — and I wanted advice from the embodiment of graceful aging. I've interviewed Clooney three times before — once over the phone when he left his home number on my voicemail instead of setting up a meeting through a publicist, once at his bachelor pad as he sat under a photo of the Rat Pack, and once over a very long dinner I cooked for him at my house. Each time, I've received his teachings.
When he rejected my store-bought salad dressing with disdain, I permanently switched to oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. I upgraded to a more expensive house because Clooney, who owns no stocks or bonds, believes in living in his money. I learned simple home repairs after Clooney made me get a ladder from the storage space under my house with him so he could climb into the attic I'd never been in, screwdriver in his mouth, crawling across the beams, to fix a noise that turned out to be a carbon monoxide alarm in the kitchen that needed new batteries.
Now I wanted advice on just how I should negotiate the future, the same question he asks in his new movie, The Midnight Sky (Netflix), which he not only stars in but also directed and coproduced. In the film, Clooney plays his oldest character yet — a terminally ill scientist rummaging through the postapocalyptic Antarctic, contemplating whether he has spent his life well.
The movie wasn't supposed to be that existential. He finished filming last February and had just started postproduction when, on March 11, the NBA canceled its games and the people who ran the editing room announced that older people would have to work from home for their own safety. “They said, ‘If you're under 50, you're fine,’ ” says Clooney. “And I was, like, ‘Wait a minute? I'm the old guy now?’ ”
Editing in lockdown in his house, Clooney made a movie that had started as a warning about the dangers of rising nationalism — an On the Beach of populism — and kept removing dialogue until this turned the film into a meditation on not being able to connect, the perils of isolation and fading away. “You couldn't help it when you're in the middle of editing from your home, where you can't go out and you can't see anybody,” he explains.
For the role, he grew a David Letterman beard, gave himself a spotty crew cut — and he might not smile once in the entire film. “If you are this sex symbol and that's tied to some notion of youth, you can feel when there's a holding on instead of a letting go,” says David Oyelowo, who portrays an astronaut in space in the movie, unaware of Earth's apocalypse. “That's what he does in The Midnight Sky that's so eye-catching. There's not an iota of that George Clooney eye twinkle or the Sexiest Man Alive. He has completely shelved it. You're allowed to really look at him. You're going, ‘Whoa, the same guy from Out of Sight with J.Lo is here with a beard and not saying any lines and letting us hike the crevices of his face?"
Clooney, unwilling to let that bubble on the level move, rejects Oyelowo's theory, noting that he's played charmless men in The American and Syriana. He scoffs at the notion that he cares less about his looks than he once did. When I ask if he's wearing makeup (because his tan appears to be bouncing off his white short-sleeve button-down shirt), he acts like I'm crazy. “I've never worn makeup in my life,” he insists. “If I have to have a black eye, I'll put a black eye on, but I've never had paper around my collar. I did when I first started, ‘cause I did what everybody told me I had to do.
By the time I started ER, never.” And his perfect hair — he hasn't put effort into that either. Not only does he claim to have cut his own hair during the pandemic; he says he's done it for 25 years. “I use a Flowbee,” he asserts to me (and, shortly afterward, to half a dozen other media outlets), mentioning that he's already worn out the vacuum attachment sold on infomercials in the 1980s, requiring his assistant to buy a replacement on eBay. “My wife won't let me Flowbee my son's hair. So I have to cut it with scissors. I'm scrappy, buddy. I climbed up into your attic.” I sigh, upset in the knowledge that I will soon be buying a Flowbee.
Despite these objections, others besides Oyelowo — such as Clooney's father, Nick, and mom, Nina (87 and 81, respectively) — have observed that George has been letting go of the oh-so-bearable lightness of George Clooney. Since George has had children, they note, he has been willing to have more earnest conversations with them. “He used to like very much to make sure that everybody had a good line to exit on,” says Nick. “I see less of requiring us to put on a routine."
Since the pandemic struck, Clooney hasn't seen his parents or those of his wife, Amal, in person. Which has been the hardest part of lockdown for him. “This is an important time for them, and it's not fair,” he points out. “My friends will talk about their kids and how they couldn't go to prom, and I go, ‘It's awful that they missed that. They'll be fine. It'll be a blip on their radar.’ People in their 80s, they're, like, ‘You know, come on, man.’ ”
For him, he says, it's just a year. The last of his 50s. Whatever. Clooney explains that he doesn't care about turning 60 in May, because his body basically feels fine. Yet he knows time is moving. “Seventy will be more of a shot to the throat,” he says about becoming closer to the age of his character in The Midnight Sky. “I'm telling you, 70 will f--- me up."
"For George, the hardest thing about getting old is not wanting to burden others,” offers his friend Rande Gerber, who thinks that The Midnight Sky is a way of exploring that issue. Still, Gerber thought Clooney was posing a long-range thought experiment. “When I got the request to talk to this magazine, I called George and said, ‘Is this another one of your pranks?’ He said, ‘I wish it was, but it's for real.’ ”
In real life, of course, burdening others remains out of the question for Clooney. The father of 3-year-old twins is still deeply self-sufficient. During the pandemic, he stained the entire interior and exterior of his house, and all the furniture inside. “It was getting dingy, and I had buckets of stain, and I was, like, ‘Well, what else am I going to do?’ It made me feel better. And I put chicken wire all around the dog yard.” (Because the family got a Saint Bernard, an adult upgrade from Clooney's pig, which passed away decades ago.) He also rewired his assistant's sewing machine.
And did some sewing himself. “I do a lot of sewing the kids’ clothes,” he says. “And my wife's dress that tore a couple of times. I was a bachelor for a long time and didn't have any money, and you have to learn how to repair things,” he adds. “If we were on an island and you had to pick somebody to help you survive, I would pick me. Ask all of my friends and they would pick me, too. I can make a waterspout out of this and a pitcher out of that."
Not that long ago, he was in his friend's 1972 Camaro, not far from his house off of Laurel Canyon, when it started to overheat. They pulled into a gas station and Clooney asked the mechanic if he could borrow a crowbar. “I pulled the generator back, pulled on the fan belt, put it back on. And we were back on the road,” he says. “But I'm intimidated by anything on the internet. Like, if I push a button and something goes wrong, I panic. I'm a Luddite when it comes to that.”
He shuns the internet and doesn't do social media, because one thing Clooney does to have a private and real life is to slow time by connecting in more meaningful ways. He's busy, of course, but he's 10 minutes early for our Zoom call (who does that?) and is now already an hour over our scheduled end time (who does that?). He turns down any project that shoots over the summer, when he gathers his family and friends at his estate on Lake Como in Italy and leads children to pick croissants he's “planted” near an asparagus patch, as if perpetrating the Godfather of Dad Jokes. He writes letters. By hand. Lots of them. Every year he goes away with Amal for a weekend and they both write each kid a letter with the date on it, as a record of where they were at that moment. He and Amal write each other letters every couple of months.
“Even in lockdown, I'll write a letter and slip it on her desk, or she'll write a letter and leave it under the pillow. I'm a big believer in letters. I have letters from Paul Newman, Walter Cronkite, Gregory Peck. I have them framed. I put them in the house. If it were a text, it would feel different. Maybe that's a generational thing, and maybe it won't be that way 20 years from now, but for me, somebody sat down and wrote it.” (Peck, in particular, is a role model for Clooney. He cast Peck's grandson Ethan as the younger version of his character in The Midnight Sky.)
Modernity poses challenges, especially for George Clooney. He named his kids Alexander and Ella, because “I didn't want, like, weird-ass names for our kids. They're already going to have enough trouble. It's hard being the son of somebody famous and successful. Paul Newman's son killed himself. Gregory Peck's son killed himself. Bing Crosby had two sons kill themselves. I have an advantage because I'm so much older that by the time my son would feel competitive, I'll literally be gumming bread.” And if his kids do take to social media to floss about their luck, he's got a plan. “We'll just make fun of it enough that it will be embarrassing."
