The Journal Meets... The Descendants star George Clooney
Last week saw George Clooney gain his fourth acting nomination at the 2012 Academy Awards. The performance in question is for The Descendants, where the 50-year-old plays a Hawaii-based businessman who, when his wife falls into a fatal coma, realises he knows very little about his family.
“I thought it was the best screenplay I’d read in a long, long time,” said the star when asked what brought him to the project. “It’s very hard to explain it, because it’s a film that so slowly unfolds. It takes it’s time. “
It’s yet another diverse role for the actor, who chose the part because he believes it’s an interesting take on a familiar theme. “I think it’s a coming of age film but the guy who’s coming of age is a 50 year old guy,” Clooney explained.
“He’s woken up to the fact that all of these betrayals that he feels – from his wife, to his children not really being great kids, to the fact that he’s the only adult in terms of his family and his cousin – he’s as responsible as anyone else for being there. Then it comes down to forgiving yourself.”
To some, he will always be a Hollywood heartthrob, not the best label to have when taking on a serious drama like The Descendants, Alexander Payne's follow up to the critically acclaimed Sideways.
“It’s the funniest thing. I get people saying, ‘surprisingly not bad in this film.’ When are you gonna stop being so surprised?” he laughed. “I will always have those skeletons that people hark back to all the time. Some will say, ‘he only plays himself’.
Those skeletons include a stuttering start to his A-list career, with a couple of box office bombs that still haunt him. “I’ve been bad in films,” he admits. “I was bad in Batman & Robin. It wasn’t a good film, but I was bad in it. I wasn’t particularly good in The Peacemaker. I missed, I didn’t understand certain things. I hadn’t done many films.
"I didn’t really understand what I was trying to do. I was playing at being the bad ass. Those guys don’t do that: they just are the bad asses. I made mistakes like that.”
