George Clooney admits being left puzzled, and irked, by Quentin Tarantino’s comments about how he’s no longer a big movie star.
“It’s been a long while since George Clooney has drawn anybody to an audience. When was his last hit where he drew an audience?” QT declared in 2019.
In a new interview with GQ, “Wolfs” stars Clooney and Brad Pitt are asked about famous directors they’ve worked with over the years. It’s then mentioned how Clooney starred with Tarantino in “From Dusk Till Dawn.” When Pitt adds that Tarantino was “pretty good” in the film, Clooney replies with, “He was OK in it.”
That’s when Clooney goes on a tangent…
“Quentin said some shit about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him,” explained Clooney. “He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about [Pitt], 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.’”
He added, “So now I’m like, all right, dude, fuck off. I don’t mind giving him shit. He gave me shit.”
The Telegraph’s Tim Robey agrees with Tarantino. In a writeup, published today, he says Clooney’s last 20 years “have not done a great deal to sustain the stardom.” His last leading role was in the moderately successful, entirely bland “Ticket to Paradise” (2022).
Clooney, whose tequila business has reportedly brought in over $500 million, has not acted in three of his last four films: Suburbicon (2017), The Tender Bar (2021) and The Boys in the Boat (2023). Instead, he’s essentially gone out of his way to not delve too much into the craft of acting. You see, now Clooney considers himself and is more interested in directing.
Sure, Clooney was once a movie star, but that was a long time ago, and he’s really had just three major box office hits in a 40-year time span: “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Gravity,” and “The Perfect Storm.”
Let us not forget that Clooney’s next film, which co-stars Brad Pitt, is getting a very bland, week-long theatrical release before being shipped off to AppleTV+ the following Friday.
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.