Before the premiere of their latest movie “Wolfs,” George Clooney and his old friend and co-star Brad Pitt collaborated in an exclusive cover story for GQ magazine. In it, Clooney was extremely open about the situation of film actors in Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino, who led Pitt to an Oscar in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” was mocked by Clooney in a lighthearted way for saying that he is no longer a cinematic star. In 1996, Clooney and Tarantino were on the same screen in “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 continued.
Commenting about the film business as a whole, Clooney and Pitt stated that Hollywood no longer produces as many movie stars as it did during their ascent via the ranks.
“Well, they haven’t developed stars the way the studio system used to,” Clooney said about Hollywood’s deficiency of celebrities. “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 from a different angle, “It’s a great time as a young actor,” he continued. “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.”
Although Clooney hasn’t done much acting in the past few years, he’s been making more films, such as “Wolfs” and Noah Baumbach’s next Netflix film, which also features Adam Sandler and Laura Dern. The Oscar winner is shocked to learn that he has been acting for 40 years. “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.”