George Clooney is “a little irritated” with Quentin Tarantino.
The veteran actor is taking issue with the famed director’s apparent comments about his celebrity status.
In a new GQ cover interview, along with his upcoming Wolfs co-star Brad Pitt, the subject of Tarantino came up and Clooney said, “Quentin said some shit about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him. He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about [Pitt] and somebody else, and then this [interviewer] 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.’”
Continued Clooney: “And I was like, ‘Since the millennium?‘ That’s kind of my whole fucking career.”
At this, Pitt laughed.
“So now I’m like, all right, dude, fuck off,” Clooney added. “I don’t mind giving him shit. He gave me shit. But no, look, we’re really lucky we got to work with these great directors. Director and screenplay is what keeps you alive.”
Technically speaking, Clooney’s career stretches back to the early 1980s. But it’s also true that he’s had considerable success since the turn of the century in movies ranging from 2000’s The Perfect Storm to the Ocean’s Eleven trilogy (which started in 2001) to 2013’s Gravity to 2016’s Hail Caesar!
Clooney co-starred with Tarantino in the director’s 1996 crime drama-horror mashup From Dusk Till Dawn, while Pitt has appeared in a couple of Tarantino films, including 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Pitt said that Tarantino “was pretty good” as an actor in Dusk, to which Clooney countered, “He was okay in it.” Pitt then added, “There’s a scene, I’m blanking on it. But he’s really good.”
It also wasn’t immediately apparent which Tarantino interview Clooney was quoting, though the director has made headlines from calling Marvel actors “not real movie stars” in the past, arguing that their comic book icons are the real stars of those films.
Speaking of which, Clooney also noted his 1997 movie Batman & Robin didn’t work.
“When I first got to the place where I could pick a movie, I took everything that came my way,” he said. “Because I didn’t understand that I was going to be held responsible for the movie. So I get offered Batman & Robin, I call my friends like, ‘I’m going to be Batman!’ You don’t really think it through. And then after I did that for three films, where they didn’t really work, I was like: Oh, I’m going to be held responsible. I need to go back to: good script, good director, if I’m allowed to pick. And that means you have to take money out of the issue. Because remember: When you’re first famous, when somebody offers you a lot of money, you’re like, ‘Fuck, I’ve never been offered money before. I’ve never been offered anything.’”