George Clooney participated in a joint cover story for GQ magazine along with his longtime friend and co-star Brad Pitt ahead of the release of their new film “Wolfs,” and he got quite candid when discussing the state of movie stars in Hollywood. Clooney playfully fired back at Quentin Tarantino, who directed Pitt to an Oscar in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and allegedly shaded Clooney recently by claiming that he is not still a movie star. Clooney and Tarantino shared the screen together in 1996’s “From Dusk Till Dawn.”
“Quentin said some shit about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him,” Clooney said. “He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about [Brad], and somebody else, and then this guy goes, ‘Well, what about George?’ He goes, he’s not a movie star. And then he literally said something like, ‘Name me a movie since the millennium.’ And I was like, ‘Since the millennium? That’s kind of my whole fucking career.’”
“So now I’m like, all right, dude, fuck off. I don’t mind giving him shit,” Clooney added.
Variety has reached out to Tarantino’s representative for comment.
Speaking about the industry at large, Clooney and Pitt said that Hollywood does not crank out movie stars the way it used to when Clooney and Pitt were rising through the ranks.
“Well, they haven’t developed stars the way the studio system used to,” Clooney said about Hollywood’s lack of stars. “We kind of were at the very end of that, where you could work at a studio and do three or four films, and there was some plan to it. And I don’t think that’s necessarily the case anymore. So it’s harder for you to sell somebody something on the back of a star.”
“But it’s a great time as a young actor,” he added from a differing perspective. “Because when I was a young actor, if you looked at the back of the L.A. Times every Monday morning they had the 64 shows that were made. And of those 64 shows, if you’re actually on one of them, you’re trying to be in the top 20 to keep your show on the air. But that was it. And then the studios were doing five films a year. Now there’s 600 shows. So there’s a lot more work for actors.”
Clooney has acted rather sparingly over the last several years, but he’s cranking up his output with movies like “Wolfs” and Noah Baumbach’s upcoming Netflix feature that co-stars Adam Sandler and Laura Dern. The Oscar winner is currently in his 40th year of being an actor, a number that shocks him.
“I remember I talked to [Matt] Damon about this 25 years ago, when he first hit with his movie and won the Oscar,” Clooney said. “I was like, ‘Just know that if you get a 10-year career, playing at that level, it’s an absolute jackpot.’ Nobody sustains it much longer than that. So yeah, I’m surprised that I still have the work.”
“There’s a narrative that people love to do with me, which is like, I’m always just playing a version of me,” Clooney later added about why his career has lasted so long. “And I always go, ‘Well, all right, but I don’t know that many people are doing “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Michael Clayton.”‘ And I think part of the reason I’m allowed to do that is I had so many genres of films that I was in that weren’t successful. You know what I mean? If you’re not wildly successful at action films, then no one’s asking you to do more action films. And the same thing with sort of everything. So part of life for me was always, the lack of massive success allowed me to do other things and try new things.”
Clooney and Pitt’s “Wolfs” is set to world premiere at the Venice Film Festival before streaming on Apple TV+ starting Sept. 27. The movie will have a one-week theatrical run beginning Sept. 20. Head over to GQ’s website to read the actors’ latest cover story in its entirety.