Clooney opens up about marriage, fame and his biggest risks

George Clooney and I are talking in a hotel room in Beverly Hills, the same hotel where we met 27 years ago when he was promoting “Out of Sight” and he told me that leading men had about a decade to make their mark and it was all downhill from there. “No one could be more surprised than me that I’m 64 years old and still getting to do what I love to do,” Clooney says in that practiced, grounded, charming way of his. Sixty-four, huh? Since he brought it up ...

Have you queued up the Beatles song since celebrating your birthday last year? “I actually got a message from Paul, which is pretty cool,” Clooney says, smiling.

Wait. Paul McCartney sent you a message on your birthday?

“Yeah, it was a video of him playing ‘When I’m 64,’” Clooney says. He pauses to let this sink in — maybe for the both of us.

“I never really thought when I was cutting tobacco in Augusta, Kentucky, that I would meet Paul, much less become friends with him,” Clooney says. “I feel very in awe. In the scheme of people, you look at Michael Jordan as the best to ever play the game. Paul’s got to be in the conversation as one of the greats of all time. So it’s really something to have him call up and do ‘When I’m 64’ for you.”

During our digressive conversation, I learn, not surprisingly, that pretty much anybody who’s anybody resides in Clooney’s phone contact list.

“I’m old. I’ve been around,” says Clooney, currently starring in Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” playing a famous and, frankly, selfish actor taking stock late in life. Is there anyone Clooney hasn’t met? Let’s find out.

So McCartney sends you a video for your birthday. Do you ever send him a message out of the blue?

Sure, from time to time. He had this song come out, this beautiful Beatles song that had never been released.

“Now and Then”? That song gutted me.

Dude, it brought me down. It had that Beatles sound and vibe. For those of us who grew up with the Beatles being the end all and be all of everything, it just brought you to a whole other place in time. He sent it to me, and I wrote him back and said, “Jesus, Paul. It’s really beautiful.”

You’ve worked with Alfonso Cuarón, the Coens, Alexander Payne and Steven Soderbergh. Is there a director that you missed?

I almost did a movie with Ridley Scott a couple of times. His movies hold up, and that’s hard to do with science fiction. But you look at “Blade Runner” and “Alien” and they don’t feel dated at all.

Are you much for self-examination?

I’m constantly trying to keep tabs on who I am as a person and hold myself to the standard that my father holds me to. I come up short. I do have that voice from my old man going, “Don’t come back and look me in the eye until you do this.”

What’s the biggest chance you took in life?

At 20 years old, jumping in my ‘76 Monte Carlo with rust all over it and saying, “I’m going to drive to California to be an actor.” My cousin Miguel, who I had met maybe three, four times in my life, had come to Kentucky to make a horse racing movie and he got me a job as an extra. And he was like, “You’ve got to come to California to be an actor.” So I got in the car, put a case of oil in the back because it was pouring out and I had to drive two days straight because if I turned the engine off, the car wouldn’t start again.

What’s biggest chance you took professionally?

I was doing a TV series and there was a famous executive producer. I won’t name him because it wouldn’t be fair or nice, I suppose. He would scream at people. I was the third or fourth banana on the show, and he was yelling and I stopped and said, “Knock it off.” And he turned on me. “What did you say to me?” And I said, “F— knock it off.” And I was eventually fired and then he did an interview saying I’d never work in this town again. I thought my career was over.

Tribune News Service