Clooney: I drove around LA with $14m in cash to thank friends
GEORGE CLOONEY gave his 14 closest friends $1 million dollars each in cash as a way of thanking them for their support while he was a struggling actor, the star has revealed.
Repaying the debt he felt he owed entailed driving around Los Angeles with the money in the back of a florist’s van, Clooney told GQ magazine as he confirmed a story that was the subject of Hollywood gossip for years.
Clooney was flush with money, having just starred in Gravity, the 2013 space thriller with Sandra Bullock, for which he agreed to accept a percentage of box office takings rather than a fee.
The film was a runaway success and Clooney, who was s i ngle at t he t i me, pondered what to do with his windfall.
“I thought, what I do have are these guys who’ve all, over a period of 35 years, helped me in one way or another,” he said.
“I’ve slept on t hei r couches when I was broke. They l oaned me money when I was broke. They helped me when I needed help over the years.
“We’re all good friends. And I thought, you know, without them I don’t have any of this.”
The 59-year-old actor had already left his friends a bequest in his will, but asked himself ‘ why they should have to wait until [I am] hit by a bus’.
However, the logistics of saying thank you could have been turned into a screenplay of a Clooney blockbuster.
Finding $14 million (£10.5 million) in cash was trickier than it might seem.
After some research, he discovered a place in downtown Los Angeles where the cash was stored on pallets.
He got hold of an old florist’s van and, accompanied by his assistant and a couple of nervous “security guys”, he went to fetch the cash.
Clooney bought 14 holdalls, packing $1 million into each of them.
He then invited his friends over to his house.
“And I just held up a map and I just pointed to all the places I got to go in the world and all the things I’ve gotten to see because of them,” he recalled. “And I said, ‘How do you repay people like that? ... Oh, well: How about a million bucks?’”
Clooney also told the magazine how he bet Brad Pitt and Don Cheadle $10,000 to stay in a “haunted house” opposite his home on Lake Como.
He managed to convince his Ocean’s 12 co-stars that the house was haunted.
The challenge was to spend the night in the house having been given a candle, six matches and a bottle of wine.
Pitt and Cheadle took up the bet while Clooney and actor Matt Damon rowed back to the middle of the lake to see how long their co-stars would last.
The answer was not very long.
“We’re sitting in the boat in the middle of the lake,” he said. “And we have to see the candle go by every window. It goes by like two or three windows and then we get a call – ‘get us out of this house!’
“And we came back and pulled them out.”