Thursday, September 2, 2010

The jovial actor talks to Kate Whiting about working with goats in Iraq and when he first realised he was famous questions with a wry joke.

Ask him about his permanent bachelor status and, without skipping a beat, the 48-year-old announces: “I’m going to get married tonight... at some point.”

Since he first graced our screens in ‘ER’ back in 1994, Clooney’s been deftly fielding questions about his latest love interest.

If you ask him a silly question, he’ll give you a silly answer.

George’s latest film offering, the intriguingly-titled ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’ is a black comedy set in Iraq, which is the second comic-take-on-war film for Clooney after 1999’s ‘Three Kings’.

He stars in and produces on the film, along with long-time friend and the film’s director Grant Heslov.

“Well, I’ve known Grant since 1982 and he has some compromising photos of me, so I had to do it, I had no choice,” he says, when asked what drew him to the project

On working with Ewan McGregor in the film, he deadpans: “After the restraining order it was really quite hard to actually work with him.”

His dry sense of humour is well-documented, but up close it almost seems like a defence-mechanism.

Joking aside, ‘Gorgeous George’ has been enjoying a lengthy spell in the spotlight recently thanks to the fact that his three latest films have all been shown at the London Film Festival, where he appeared with his current girlfriend, Italian TV presenter Elizabeth Canalis, on his arm.

The first of these films, Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’, sees George in the title role - with Meryl Streep as Mrs Fox.

‘Up In The Air’, released in January, is a romantic comedy about a businessman with a penchant for expensive business trips, and ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’ does what it says on the proverbial tin.

Inspired by journalist Jon Ronson’s non-fictional best-seller, the film follows a reporter (Ewan McGregor) who discovers a top-secret experimental wing of the US military - the New Earth Army - a legion of Jedi-style warriors rumoured to have psychic powers, and the ability to kill a goat just by staring at it.

Through a sequence of flashbacks, we see a younger-looking Clooney, as Lyn Cassady, with long hair and army uniform, being taught ‘psychic’ skills by the programme’s arch-hippy founder Bill Django (Jeff Bridges).

But despite the film’s stellar cast - Kevin Spacey plays Cassady’s nemesis Larry Hooper - everyone just wants to talk about the goats.

“The funny thing is, the goat was a great actor. He walked in and we were like, ‘OK, stare at the camera’ and he was like, ‘Yuhh’. If I could get Ewan to do that it would help.”

Growing more serious, George explains that he and Grant had been eyeing up the script for some time.

“This is a script that’s been around town for a while, all of us were aware of it for a bit and it was named one of the best unmade screenplays, so we were all sort of anxious to get our hands on it and see if there was a way we could do it.”

The character of Cassady is, by turns, insightful and quite stupid. With his breakthrough film role in the Coen Brothers’s ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ George says he is no stranger to what he glibly calls ‘the idiot syndrome’.

George was born to a beauty queen mother and news presenter father, and grew up in a small town in Kentucky. When he was 21, he moved to Los Angeles and spent a decade as a struggling actor, with roles in TV pilots that never became full series. Then came his big break in ‘ER’.

“Look, everything we do is luck and the truth of the matter is, I ended up on a television show that was averaging 40 million people a week. “Today you hear numbers in the States about ‘American Idol’ getting 17 million viewers. We were averaging episodes that did close to 50 million people in a week.

That’s a lot, that makes you famous no matter what you do,” he says.

Fifteen years on from ‘ER’, and with his work at the latest film festival over, George is currently in Italy - where he has a villa on Lake Como - making another movie with co-producer Grant Heslov, a hit man story called ‘The American’.

Come January, Clooney is bound to be among the names touted for awards glory, but with so many films out at the moment, does he feel like he’s competing with himself?

“I have been competing with myself for years,” he jokes.

“A lot of the time when it seems like you’re bringing out films for awards season, you’re really doing it because it’s actually when grown-up films come out. “It’s not easy to bring out a film like ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats’ in the summer. It sort of gets swallowed up and it’s not easy to bring it out in February necessarily, because it’s sort of a dead zone time for films, so this is really about the right time for the film to come out.”

As for his future projects, George is back to his joking best. “No more farm animals.”