George Clooney reflects on fame, family life and reuniting with Adam Sandler

Jay Kelly is one of the most famous movie stars in the world. Handsome, humorous and charming, he is renowned for his professionalism on set and his witty repartee around the dinner table off it.

But Jay has a problem. He's not getting any younger - "He's not 25 anymore," observes someone in his circle at one point, to which another fires back, '"He's not 55 anymore" - and a series of bad life choices made over the years are springing up to bite him in the back.

He is many times divorced and starting to feel lonely: of his two daughters, the younger barely tolerates him, the older openly despises him. He has lost most of his friends along the way, and when he casually remarks to one of the two employees who have remained loyal to him, his fiercely devoted manager Ron (Adam Sandler), that "You're my friend who takes 15 per cent of my earnings," you can see why.

How best to sum up Jay then? "This guy's a d*ck!" exclaims George Clooney, who has visibly given himself a whale of a time playing Jay, and is now shaking his head in despair when we meet to talk about the film at the legendary Beverly Hills Hotel.

"He's like Frankenstein's monster. You remember how Frankenstein's monster kills the little girl by throwing her into the water 'cause he's run out of flowers to throw in and she's just there? It's like everybody I go through, I just happily destroy their lives along the way!"

Never one to turn down an opportunity to send himself up, the 64-year-old actor says he leaped at the opportunity to be part of this film, written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Noah Baumbach of Marriage Story and Barbie fame.

It also co-stars his good friend Adam Sandler. "Everything I've ever done is an Adam Sandler film," he jokes now with a sidelong teasing glance at his buddy, sitting next to him and chuckling throughout our chat. "I've done movies he wasn't even in that were Adam Sandler films!"

Ask him if he's worried that the public might start to wonder, after seeing the film, just where George Clooney ends and Jay Kelly begins, he shrugs the question off with trademark insouciance. "It's funny because a lot of people have come up to me and said, 'You know, it's like you're playing yourself.' They'll say, 'Wow, when you were doing this, you were sort of holding a mirror up, weren't you?'

"But I really don't think of it that way. I don't really relate to this character because I don't have anything like the regrets this guy has. I have a very different life than he does. All the people that I've worked with, they still work with me. And you know, my kids like me."

His face softens as he thinks of the small twins, Ella and Alexander, that he and his wife Amal Clooney welcomed into the world in 2017. "I mean," he adds, hastily turning any hint of sentimentality into a joke, "they're eight. They could change. But at this point they still like me!"

For years, George was known as the last of Hollywood's die-hard bachelors. He insisted that a brief marriage to actress Talia Balsam from 1989 to 1993 had jaded him on the institution: a subsequent, and impressively lengthy list of girlfriends, including Kelly Preston, Renee Zellweger, British model Lisa Snowdon, Italian actress Elisabetta Canalis, and French TV personality Celine Balitran, had gained him the reputation of a love 'em and leave 'em operator on a global scale. He said, firmly and repeatedly, that fatherhood was never in the cards for him. In fact, when former co-stars Nicole Kidman and Michelle Pfeiffer separately bet him $10,000 each that he'd be married with children by the age of 40, he took the bet and won. History does not record whether he collected the money from either of them.

He was, he made it plain, the man who would never settle down.

Then, one summer evening in 2013, a friend visited him at his house in Lake Como, accompanied by British-Lebanese lawyer and activist Amal Alamuddin, a brunette beauty with endless legs, huge brown eyes, a cascade of glossy jet black hair, and a brain like a steel trap. George took one look at her, and his socks were not so much knocked off as sent flying into outer space. Twelve years later, the Clooneys and their twins are, famously, among the happiest of families in Hollywood.

True to form, George wears his recently-acquired family man image lightly. "I clearly picked right," he smiled to me recently. "Now, the question to put to Amal, would be, did [open italics] she [close italics] pick right? But [open italics] I [close italics] picked right all right."

He says now that making Jay Kelly has made him think long and hard about the nature of fame. "Fame is a funny thing," he comments, "because fame offers you the opportunity to be able to do the projects you want to do. But there's another side of it because you run towards it like a bug into the light and then, when you get there, you get really zapped! I mean, you do want it, but holy sh*t, there's a lot of other pieces that come into play!"

Do not for one second, however, think that he is complaining. "When I was a young guy, I had a job cutting tobacco for $3 an hour, and I used to watch ... do you remember the TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?" he nods of the popular 1980s documentary series, hosted by Britain's own Robin Leach, that probed the private lives of the wealthy and the privileged.

"And I'd watch it and I'd hear some famous actor complaining about their life and I'd be, like, "F*ck you, I'm cutting tobacco!" I don't find any reason to complain about anything about being famous and I don't find anything I have to complain about. I caught that brass ring. I got very lucky in my career and in my life, and a lot of what fame has afforded me is the ability to make films like this.

"And I am lucky to have been offered this role of Jay Kelly. You know, I'm 64 years old - these parts don't come along very often. And the rest of it ... yeah, there are things that you can't do and there are things about fame that are limiting. But, you know, it's a lot worse cutting tobacco!"

As successful as he is now, George is quick to remind you that he was not born with a Hollywood silver spoon in his mouth. Although his father, Nick Clooney, was a popular local anchorman and television host in his childhood home of Lexington, Kentucky, and his beloved aunt Rosemary Clooney had been a hugely popular singer in the 1950s, often appearing on television with Bing Crosby, he didn't find stardom until the age of 33 playing the womanising but irresistible Dr. Doug Ross in ER. He still remembers the lean years in between, and says, firmly, that he intends never to forget them.

"I was a struggling actor for ten years," he once told me, "and I have a great understanding of what it's like to try to make things work. I would buy suits that were too long in the leg, cut the bottoms off and hem them up with a stapler, and use the leftover fabric to make ties for work.

"I worked at a ladies' shoe store, and, oh, man, there were some terrible shoes I sold. This was 1979, 1980, and there was a whole generation of older women in that part of America who had had their fourth toe cut off so that they could wear those really narrow pumps, and so every time you'd see a 75-year-old lady coming into the store, you'd all go "You take her!" "No, you take her!" because you'd have to look at that foot with the toe cut off, and yech, holy sh*t, it was like foot binding or something.

"So I know how lucky I am to have gotten to where I have gotten to in life, because I wasn't even supposed to have this career!"

He's even philosophical about the films he's made that have not been successes - most notably the notorious flop Grizzly 2 - a horror film about a grizzly bear intent on revenge against a group of poachers - which was filmed in 1983 but for various backstage reasons not fully released until 2020; Grizzly 2 was universally panned as a film, but had the benefit of introducing the 21-year-old George to his then fellow newcomer and still good pal Laura Dern, now turning up again in Jay Kelly as Jay's long-suffering publicist, Liz.

"Our proudest moment," nods Laura now, mock-triumphantly, of the film.

"And just for the record," puts in George eagerly, "they didn't even release it until three years ago, and you know, 40 years later, we're still getting terrible reviews!"

And they both fall about laughing: George has long given up allowing a little thing like a bad review to bother him. "Listen, I've been doing this for 40 years. If I see a film now that I was in, I don't remember it as the movie that you might see. I remember it as the experience on the set. I'll remember the crew, or the friendships I made there. Because a lot of the times, some of the worst films you've ever done are where you make some of your best friends."

To sum up: Jay Kelly might be a troubled and lonely soul, but George Clooney is anything but. As he has told me, again and again over the last few years, "I get up in the morning and I'm happy that I go to work; I have a beautiful family that I go home to and we have a very lucky life. And if you don't celebrate that, something's wrong."