George Clooney spoke with 60 Minutes tonight about the upcoming Broadway adaptation of his Oscar-nominated movie, Good Night, and Good Luck. In the play Clooney, now 63, plays newsman Edward R. Murrow, a role he said he was not ready to play when he directed the film in 2005.
“Murrow had a gravitas to him that at 42 years old I didn’t — I wasn’t able to pull off,” he told 60 Minutes’ Jon Wertheim.
The flip side of that, said Clooney, is that there are roles he once played for which he’s now no longer a fit.
“Look, I’m 63 years old,” the actor told Wertheim. “I’m not trying to compete with 25-year-old leading men. That’s not my job. I’m not doing romantic films anymore.”
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Not that he’s been doing many, anyway.
While Clooney was promoting Ticket to Paradise in 2022, he noted that he hadn’t made a romantic comedy since 1996.
Still, age and experience do have their privileges. Beyond having the gravitas to play Murrow, Clooney told 60 Minutes that he finally feels able to hold his own on a Broadway stage.
“I don’t know that I could’ve [done it before]. I wasn’t — I didn’t do the work required to get there.”
He continued, “I mean, there isn’t a single actor alive that wouldn’t have loved to have, you know, been on Broadway. So that’s — that’s the fun of it.”
Clooney does have a pretty good model for how to navigate away from being a romantic lead.
“[Paul] Newman was the best at this,” Clooney told the Washington Post in 2022. “He figured out, [with] The Verdict, quite honestly, that he was a character actor and he accepted that role. He didn’t fight it or push and try to get his face done or look younger and act younger. He just said, ‘Okay, that’s who I am now,’ and he changed expectations a little bit.”
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