How the Clooneys are coping
George Clooney opens up about his love for his wife, his fears for his children and the tedium of lockdown housework
HE’S one of the hottest men in Hollywood with enough drop-dead gorgeousness and charm to melt the iciest heart. She’s one of the smartest and most stylish legal eagles in the world – brains and beauty in one sophisticated package.
Together they make up one seriously golden couple – but there’s something else George and Amal Clooney are. And that’s elusive.
Think about it: when was the last time we saw these two out and about? There have been no snaps of them having cosy dinners, no sightings at airports and, now that the world has pretty much ground to a halt, no dazzling red-carpet displays at fancy film premieres either.
As for their twins, Alexander and Ella, there isn’t even an Instagram update or two to satisfy our curiosity. Social media doesn’t happen in Clooneyland.
But while George and Amal may not be in our faces, that doesn’t mean they’re not busy doing important stuff – in her case, protecting press freedom, among other things; and in his, working on a range of projects, including his new Netflix flick, The Midnight Sky.
However, the 59-year-old Oscar winner was forced to emerge last month when GQ magazine named him their icon of the year. And fans of Gorgeous George were happier than, well, the last time he popped up.
He gave one of his most revealing interviews in years, opening up about work, his kids and that generous gesture of his in 2013 involving suitcases of cash and his closest pals.
George is most excited about his Netflix movie – his first for the streaming giant – which is due for release at the end of this month. He directs and stars in the sci-fi adventure, which he describes as “Gravity meets The Revenant”.
He plays a ravaged, lonely scientist in the Arctic who believes he’s the last surviving man on Earth. Then he discovers a group of astronauts who are planning to return to Earth, which is facing a mysterious Armageddon-like catastrophe.
“I actually thought it was a very hopeful film,” he says. “It kind of says, ‘Although we may not get out of it [Earth] alive, we might get out of it intact somehow’. And I liked the idea of that.”
Yet while he may be a hotshot movie star, George is also just like any parent in 2020 dealing with the perils of kids crashing Zoom work calls.
During his virtual interview he was interrupted by three-year-old Alexander.
Sadly, no footage was released of this moment but interviewer Zach Baron later described the sweet father-son exchange in which George asked his son if he knew he had chocolate on his face. “Do you know that? What is that? Did you have chocolate?”
He also asked the tot to say how old he is. “Three. Because I got my birthday,” the little boy says.
Proud George then mentions that Alex can speak fluent Italian – a skill no doubt picked up from time spent at their second home in Italy’s Lake Como – and asks him to say, “It’s very hot.” “Molto caldo,” his son replies. Pretty impressive – as George says, his kids inherited their mother’s brains.
IT’S not really surprising that no visuals emerged of Alex’s Zoom-bomb. Neither twin has been seen since December 2018 when Amal was snapped carrying them out of a hotel. The couple are uber-cautious about taking their tots out in public as they’ve both championed political causes. Last
year George said he didn’t want his children to be “targets” after Amal (42) took on a case against the militant organisation Isis. “We have plenty of real, proper security issues we have to deal with on a fairly daily basis,” he told Scott Feinberg’s Awards Chatter podcast.
Avoiding the ever-present paparazzi is another challenge. “We walk out the door and everyone surrounds us. There’s a bounty on my kids’ heads for a photo. Everything changes when you have kids. You have to protect them.”
So for now we have to content ourselves with the snippets he reveals every now and then. Both children seem to have inherited their dad’s jokester personality. “They do pranks already. They put peanut butter on their shoes, so that it looks like poo-poo and stuff,” he told Today.
While she usually leaves the jokes up to George, Amal showed off her funny side at the 2020 CPJ International Press Freedom Awards last month. On collecting her Gwen Ifill Press Freedom award from Meryl Streep, she quipped that she and the Oscar winner and press-freedom advocate shared one very special thing – her husband.
“I know I can’t ever hope to win the number of awards you’ve won, but it does occur to me that we have something special in common – which is that we’ve both been married to my husband,” she said, referring to Meryl and George’s roles as a married couple in the 2009 animated film Fantastic Mr Fox. “And, honestly, the fact that you did it as Mr and Mrs Fantastic Fox just makes that so much less awkward,” she added.
GEORGE and Amal celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary in September, but typically there was no fuss made – well, not in public anyway. However, in a recent interview with CBS’ Sunday Morning to promote his new movie, George couldn’t help but gush about his wife.
“There’s no question that having Amal in my life changed everything for me. It was the first time that everything she did and everything about her was infinitely more important than anything about me.
“And then we had these two knuckleheads,” he said, referring to the twins.
Initially he and Amal didn’t talk about having kids. “And then one day we just said, ‘ What do you think?’”One thing led to another and they ended up in a doctor’s office having an ultrasound. “They’re like ‘ You got a baby boy!’ and I was like, ‘Baby boy, fantastic!’ And they go, ‘And you got another one there’. I was up for one. Again, I’m old. All of a sudden, it’s two. It’s hard to get me to not talk and I just stood there for like 10 minutes going, ‘What?’”
But he wouldn’t change it for the world. “It’s very fulfilling.”
The family is based mainly in the UK, where they have a home on the River Thames. Lockdown saw George learning to do DIY haircuts as well as a bunch of other domestic duties.
“I’m mopping and vacuuming and doing the laundry and the dishes every day,” he says. “I feel like my mother in 1964. You know, I understand why she burnt her bra.”
George also shed light on a story that’s been doing the rounds for years – how he gave 14 of his closest friends $1 million each in cash in a suitcase. “All of them, over a period of 35 years, have helped me in one way or another,” he says.
“I’ve slept on their couches when I was broke. They loaned me money, they helped me when I needed help over the years. And I’ve helped them over the years. We’re all good friends and I thought without them I don’t have any of this.”