Q&A: Clooney on ‘Midnight Sky’ and his twilight as an actor
NEW YORK (AP) — How has 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 o 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.
“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.
Debuting Wednesday on Netflix, “The Midnight Sky,” based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel “Good Morning, Midnight,” is Clooney’s seventh film as director and his biggest scaled production yet. In an interview with The Associated Press, the 59-year-old actor-filmmaker discussed his new movie, the arc of his career and his latest novelty device of choice. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
AP: You finished shooting “The Midnight Sky” in February, right before the pandemic began. How has your year been since?
Clooney: 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.
AP: It’s been years since you were the lead in a film. Why?
Clooney: Things change for you as an actor. The roles that are brought to you become very di erent. I was doing an interview the other day and they asked if this was the way my career is going to be going, playing more character actor roles. I was like, well, I didn’t want to. (Laughs) But I’m almost 60 years old. That’s how it works. I focus on actors who I admired greatly and how they handled their career. (Paul) Newman, who was a very good friend of mine, by the time he was in his mid’50s, he’s doing “The Verdict,” which is a character-actor piece. Even though he was a giant movie star, one of greats of all time, he was developing as he grew older the character-actor pieces he found interesting, that demanded less of him.
AP: “Nobody’s Fool” is a great late-period Newman movie.
Clooney: Yeah, I just watched that the other day. I hadn’t seen it in forever. I forgot about him stealing the snow plow. That’s a really underrated movie. But there’s only a couple ways you can go if you’re a person in my shoes. You can try to deny your aging. You can dye your hair and get a face lift and try to still be the guy who gets the girl in the movies. Or you can accept that you’re getting older and be that guy. The reason I got into directing and writing and producing 35 years ago was because I knew at some point I don’t want to be worried about what some casting director thinks of me at -- I used to say 60 but I’ll move it to 65 now.