There is a moment in Jay Kelly when the eponymous midlife-crisis-suffering Hollywood star, played by George Clooney, watches an awards ceremony showreel of his greatest hits. To create this, Jay Kelly director Noah Baumbach delved into Clooney’s back catalogue, plucking clips from films such as The Peacemaker, From Dusk Till Dawn and Out Of Sight. Not that he told his leading man.
“When I was there, sitting in the audience the first time they ran that, I thought, ‘Holy shit!’” says Clooney. “I had no idea it was going to be my actual films.” They shot the scene during the final week of production, and Clooney had been wondering how they were going to execute it. “I thought maybe they were going to do some AI-generated shit,” he grins. “So that part surprised me. How bad were some of my haircuts? The mullets I had!”
For anyone who has followed Clooney’s career, this scene can only emphasise the similarities between the fictional actor and the guy who plays him. They are both stars of a certain age, from Kentucky, who field questions about politics, and have a bedazzling effect on those they encounter. On the face of it, Clooney has never come closer to playing himself. Surely that made him pause when he first read the script — about a movie star who embarks on a journey of self-discovery — which Baumbach and Emily Mortimer co-wrote with Clooney in mind. Did he think, ‘Should I really go there?’
Not at all, insists Clooney when Screen International meets him during the BFI London Film Festival, sitting sideways in his chair, dangling his feet over one of its arms. He said yes before reading the script, out of pure enthusiasm for working with Baumbach (“I like his aesthetic and I think he’s a smart storyteller”). Then, when he did read it, he saw it as “a story about a man-child whose daughters can’t stand him, has a terrible relationship with his father and has to pay for all of his friends who, one by one, desert him…” He laughs. “I don’t relate to that. Now when I see it, I go, ‘Oh, there are a lot of overlaps.’ But that wasn’t how I read the script. Thank god.”
He says he felt far more proximity to his character in Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air (2009), which earned him the second of three best actor Oscar nominations to date. “That was all about, ‘I never want to get married, never want to have children, I’m perfectly happy living a very simple life…’ I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is asking me to talk about shit that I’ve sort of said before.’” (Clooney is now happily married with eight-year-old twins.) Jay Kelly, in contrast, drew him in through the device of the character’s impromptu European trip, and the way it exposes him to the messy world beyond the velvet rope. “I like the guy who’s out in the world he doesn’t know at all. I thought it would be fun to do.”
After premiering at Venice, the Netflix-backed film was released theatrically by the streamer before debuting on the platform on December 5.
Double act
Another aspect of Jay Kelly that appealed to Clooney was the prospect of collaborating with comedy superstar Adam Sandler, who co-stars as Jay’s loyal manager. “We’ve known each other a long time,” says Clooney. “We played basketball together. He’s a great, normal cat. And a gifted actor.
“There’s a thing that happens with some actors I’ve worked with — I have it with [Brad] Pitt — where there’s this ability to talk over the top of one another. That requires a huge amount of confidence in the other actor, and a lack of ego to say, ‘Well, you can step on my line here.’ The very first day Adam and I shot, we started doing it. I had an understanding, without even looking where he was, of what he was doing and where he was in the scene. That doesn’t happen all that often with actors working together.”
One notable aspect of Jay Kelly is the way it presents a star’s relationship with their team, and the tensions it can create between the personal and the professional. This, at least, is something Clooney can relate to. “Yeah,” he sighs. “I’ve had times when I thought someone was my friend and they weren’t; he was taking money from me, which was a surprise. It happens if you’re focused on your career and you’re not paying attention to the people you think are your friends.
“Now, I have a simple, pared-down life and the people I have have been around me for a long time. My agent Bryan Lourd is one of my best friends. I just did a play [Good Night, And Good Luck] for six months in New York. There’s no money in that, but he said, ‘Great, we’ll figure it out.’ He’s certainly not trying to make a buck off me.”
Having spent the past few decades balancing his acting with directing, Jay Kelly represents a new phase for Clooney. He describes it as “getting to reinvest in acting again”, without all the other, more time-consuming responsibilities that keep him from his family for too long. “I’m enjoying walking onto somebody’s set and having them tell me where to stand.”
His next project is In Love, a Paul Weitz-directed adaptation of Amy Bloom’s bestselling memoir In Love: A Memoir Of Love And Loss. “It is a little $7m independent film shooting in Switzerland about coming to terms with Alzheimer’s and end-of-life suffering. It’s a fascinating screenplay.”
Then Clooney is finally getting the long-awaited Ocean’s 14 rolling, reuniting him with Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts and Don Cheadle for another bout of stylish heisting. “We don’t have a start date but we’ve finally got a budget approved. It’ll be fun. The older we get, the better for this one, because it’s a film about how the Ocean’s gang can’t do it the way we used to.”
Clearly, being an ageing A-lister does not bother Clooney in the way it does Jay Kelly. Did watching that surprise, reality-sourced showreel make him reflective at all? “I think as you get older, you always get a little reflective about things,” he says. “But if you look at this film, this is a character who is just steeped in regret. I don’t have any of that.
“I get to look at things from a position of being grateful and having joy looking backwards. Yes, I’ve tried a bunch of things and failed. But living with failure is easy. There is no regret in failing — that happens to everyone, all the time.
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