George Clooney is just like us during the pandemic — sort of
How has Hollywood's George Clooney been handling isolation? Aside from spending time with his wife, Amal Clooney, and their 3-year-old twins, and editing his new film The Midnight Sky, he’s relied on, like many others, a text chain with pals and Zoom.
He just got off one with Matt Damon and John Krasinski.
“In some ways, we keep more in touch now than we did before,” says Clooney, speaking by phone from London.
"I’m kind of doing what everyone’s doing; washing dishes and doing laundry and mopping floors. Mostly I just wish I was able to see my mom and dad, and that kind of thing. They’re social creatures and it’s not as much fun when they can’t be out with their old friends," he told the Associated Press.
When asked if he was worried for what Hollywood might look like after the pandemic, Clooney wasn't too worried. "My concern is only specifically in the theatres themselves because they’re going to have to tread water for at least six months before people are in anyway comfortable enough to go in big groups.
"So you’ve got to keep them afloat. They are a part of our economy. They’re what people do on a Friday night. People have to get out of the house. It’s like music venues for concerts. We subsidize oil companies, we can subsidise theaters.
"Having said that, once we get through it, this sounds so much like everything we heard when television and VHS and DVDs came in. I have no fear at all that the theatre world is going to be around."
Speaking about his spouse Amal, who is a renowned international human rights lawyer, and if she has changed his approach to moviemaking, Clooney said that for the last 15-20 years, "I’ve spent about half of my day working on things other than the movie business because I have interests in other issues around the world".
"But there are some funny moments. I have an office and she has an office and they’re kind of up against each other. The other day, I was doing the Howard Stern Show. We’re talking about, like, a prank pooping in a cat box. And on the other side of the wall, my wife is having a conversation trying to keep Maria Ressa from going to prison in the Philippines. She can hear me and I can hear her. We go to dinner afterward and say: what an insane household we live in."
The Midnight Sky, which Clooney directed and stars in, is an apocalyptic sci-fi drama with some striking solitude. A thickly bearded Clooney plays an astronomer with terminal cancer living at the Barbeau Observatory in the Arctic Circle. It’s 2049. When cataclysm covers the globe, he — and a young, unspeaking girl (Caoilinn Springall) — are potentially all that remains, along with the returning crew of a space expedition to a Jupiter moon.
Discussing his seventh film as director and his biggest scaled production yet, the 59-year-old actor-filmmaker said he always saw in this what the idea of what regret can do to you.
"I always thought what he’s really dying of is not cancer but regret. It’s killing him. I know people who are older — older than me, even — who live with real regret. It’s deep in them. When you get older, it’s a cancer. Everyone has regrets. You hope you don’t have the ones that last a lifetime."
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