There are whispers of Clooney in the character he portrays: the aw-shucks charm, the matinee-idol swagger. But the real-life veteran movie star, who is nothing if not charming when he\u2019s in London to talk about the film, never seems to have needed the sort of tolerant babysitting that Kelly\u2019s agent \u2013 played by a hugely likable Adam Sandler<\/a> \u2013 is forced to endure.<\/p>\n Clooney seems to be the epitome of clean cut. He acts. He speaks out on issues he cares about. He has had successful business ventures, including as a founder of the Casamigos tequila company, which he sold his share in for more than $200 million. And he has committed to philanthropic endeavours that include underwriting \u2013 with his agent, as it happens \u2013 a series of US high schools that aim to produce a more diverse range of people to work in the film industry.<\/p>\n Nobody has dug up any stories about Clooney starting bar fights or, as he does in Baumbach\u2019s film, causing havoc on trains.<\/p>\n \u201cMy agent is Bryan Lourd, who\u2019s one of the great guys in the business,\u201d Clooney says. \u201cMy relationship with him is nothing but admiration and respect. And I can tell you that because I\u2019ve been in situations 25 years ago where none of that was true.\u201d<\/p>\n The script for Jay Kelly, which Baumbach wrote with the English actor Emily Mortimer, draws heavily on the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries \u2013 the story of an aged Swedish academic travelling for an honorary degree \u2013 to dramatise the sad-dad, empty-nester energies of an ageing A-lister. <\/p>\n [\u00a0Jay Kelly review: George Clooney and Adam Sandler can\u2019t save this Noah Baumbach movieOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Flashbacks to happier times with Kelly\u2019s first wife \u2013 played by Eve Hewson<\/a> \u2013 and melancholic visits to his elder, estranged daughter punctuate a journey towards his own lifetime-achievement ceremony in Tuscany. He has an ulterior motive for attending: he is also tracking his younger daughter, Daisy, in the hope of rekindling their daddy-daughter dynamic.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve had people in history who were great people and also kind of lousy parents along the way,\u201d Clooney says. \u201cCan you fix things going back? I would hope so. I\u2019ve often tried to repair things. I\u2019ve come to people and said, \u2018I didn\u2019t handle that very well.\u2019 And that\u2019s good. You hope to be able to do that. But maybe not with your own kids.\u201d<\/p>\n Clooney often plays down his stardom<\/a>. When I met him in the depths of the pandemic, in late 2020, he was similarly keen to emphasise his ordinariness. \u201cI can rewire lamps. I can still take the sink apart and put it back together,\u201d he said then.<\/p>\n Perhaps not uncoincidentally, when he was a child, in Kentucky, his mother would slow down as they drove past things people had left out as refuse. \u201cShe\u2019d see an old Singer sewing machine, fish it out of the pile, and take it home and wire it into a lamp,\u201d he told Esquire magazine recently.<\/p>\n Clooney now lives mainly on a farm in Provence, in southern France, with his wife, Amal<\/a>, the British human-rights lawyer, whom he married in 2014, and their twins, Ella and Alexander, who are eight, and speak Italian, and whom he drives around on a tractor.<\/p>\n The day the magazine visited the family, he had just fixed the motorised cover on their swimming pool by fishing a broken piece out of the mechanism. \u201cI felt like a king! The kids are cheering, and I\u2019m in the pool holding up the piece of plastic, going, Yeaahhh, that\u2019s right!\u201d<\/p>\n [\u00a0George Clooney: \u2018We live on a farm in France. I was worried about raising our kids in LA\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Clooney likes them to see him do what he saw his mum do.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s important to me that they can survive,\u201d he told the magazine.<\/p>\n \u201cA good portion of my life growing up was on a farm, and as a kid I hated the whole idea of it,\u201d he said. But now, for the children, \u201cIt\u2019s, like, they\u2019re not on their iPads, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n Domaine du Canadel is not the kind of farm you\u2019d find in Ireland, of course: it has 40 hectares (100 acres) of grapes and 1,200 olive trees. <\/p>\n The twins\u2019 Italian is useful when the family are at their home on Lake Como \u2013 another of the half-dozen or so properties in a portfolio estimated to be worth about $50 million \u2013 where they go to relax.<\/p>\n Clooney has owned Villa Oleandra, the Lake Como house, since 2002. He had been riding back from lunch nearby with Gregory Peck, the Oscar-winning star of Roman Holiday and To Kill a Mockingbird, when his motorbike broke down. He knocked on the villa\u2019s door for help, then ended up spending the afternoon in its garden, chatting to the owner, a member of the Heinz ketchup family.<\/p>\n Clooney ended up buying the house \u2013 which he apparently hadn\u2019t yet stepped inside \u2013 for a reported \u20ac11.7 million. A few years later he spent another \u20ac8 million or so on Villa Margherita, next door, adding a bridge to connect them.<\/p>\n The 64-year-old first appeared on TV as long ago as 1978, as a teenage extra \u2013 he was in a scene in which he had to carry a barrel \u2013 in an NBC miniseries called Centennial, which was partly filmed in Kentucky.<\/p>\n That was around the time he worked cutting tobacco, for $3 an hour, sold insurance door to door and slept on friends\u2019 floors while he auditioned for proper roles. <\/p>\n Gradually his CV grew to the point where it included a couple of episodes of Murder, She Wrote in the mid-1980s and a decent stint in the comedy Roseanne a few years later. <\/p>\n Then, in 1994, not long after his divorce from his first wife, Talia Balsam (the daughter of the veteran character actor Martin Balsam), ER delivered Clooney overnight stardom \u2013 at a relatively geriatric 33. <\/p>\n In the much-praised medical drama, which also gave us Julianna Margulies, he played the kindly paediatrician Doug Ross, ever breaking bad news with a gentle frown. Suddenly, the star of Return of the Killer Tomatoes was being touted as the most handsome man in the world. <\/p>\n It didn\u2019t take long for big film roles to flow his way: he starred in From Dusk to Dawn, with Harvey Keitel, in One Fine Day, opposite Michelle Pfeiffer, and in the Steven Soderbergh<\/a> movie Out of Sight, with Jennifer Lopez. <\/p>\n They were followed by Soderbergh\u2019s Ocean\u2019s Eleven remake and its sequels, in which he starred with Brad Pitt, as well as more personal projects, such as Good Night, and Good Luck, about the American television journalist Ed Murrow, which he wrote and directed, and which was nominated for six Oscars<\/a>.<\/p>\n If for most of that time Clooney has personified the platonic ideal of a star, in the early 1980s, like many in Los Angeles then, he had brushes with chemical misuse. \u201cI tried \u2013 I did blow and stuff,\u201d he told Esquire. \u201cI used to make jokes about how I did too many drugs, but the truth is, it was never a big issue for me at all.\u201d<\/p>\n He nonetheless got through those early years largely unscathed. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re a young actor you start out and you do everything for free. You\u2019re doing Equity Waiver theatre,\u201d he says in London, referring to small American productions that neither require nor offer union pay and benefits.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re doing all these things, and suddenly somebody\u2019s going to pay you. You think, I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m making money. And so I don\u2019t think you really have the luxury of saying, \u2018Well, I don\u2019t know if I\u2019m really up for fame.\u2019 Because you\u2019re running headlong toward the next job. You\u2019re not thinking about any of that. You\u2019re just thinking, How do I keep working?\u201d<\/p>\n Clooney\u2019s recent, hugely successful turn in the Broadway adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck was, remarkably, his first time on stage since playing Sid Vicious in a 1986 production in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n He believes that his ability to stay grounded can be largely attributed to fame having arrived later in his life. <\/p>\n \u201cI had the chance to figure out how to live life before I figured out how to be famous, and I don\u2019t think this character did,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Adam Sandler, smiling beside Clooney, is inclined to agree. For all the anarchy of his on-screen antics, the comic is, famously, a solid family man \u2013 and a dependable character actor.<\/p>\n He and Clooney have known each other since the 1990s. Lorne Michaels, the producer behind Saturday Night Live, introduced them when Sandler was a regular on that American TV institution.<\/p>\n The show, which has never had much purchase in Ireland or Britain, remains a star-making factory in the United States: Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Tina Fey and Will Ferrell all started out under the SNL banner. Sandler was part of the comic troupe from 1993. Clooney first hosted two years after that.<\/p>\n Sandler\u2019s performance is the best thing about Jay Kelly. The film is backed by Netflix, with which the comic has made a dozen monstrously successful (and monstrously critically mauled) comedies, including the Murder Mystery movies, with Jennifer Aniston.<\/p>\n Despite the brickbats, Sandler has previously broken into the awards-season conversation with impressive turns in Paul Thomas Anderson<\/a>\u2019s Punch-Drunk Love and the Safdie brothers\u2019 Uncut Gems. Jay Kelly sees the actor in another emotional wringer.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not always as hard as you might imagine for someone who works in comedy \u2013 a genre we shouldn\u2019t underestimate, Sandler says. <\/p>\n \u201cMost stand-up comedians I\u2019ve met, they live with this constant pressure, because the results are immediate. People come up to you all the time, like, \u2018Be funny.\u2019 And I can\u2019t. I don\u2019t usually rise to that. It\u2019s tough. You\u2019re trying to make everyone laugh, and sometimes you can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n In common with the late Robin Williams, Sandler is arguably at his best in his straight roles. Though there are certainly laughs in Punch-Drunk Love, his turn as a deeply apprehensive small-time entrepreneur is a masterpiece in applied rage. Uncut Gems<\/a>, one of the most stressful films you might ever see, depicts his gambling addict hurtling madly about an increasingly unhelpful New York.<\/p>\n Despite the endless worries heaped on him in Jay Kelly, his Ron Sukenick is an altogether less wired character.<\/p>\n The film is Sandler\u2019s second collaboration with Baumbach, whose movies are defined by contemporary anxieties, neurotic humour, brittle relationships and literary dialogue. Collaborations with Greta Gerwig<\/a> (with whom Baumbach worked so well that they\u2019re now married), from Frances Ha to Barbie, and a recurring ensemble of actors, notably Ben Stiller and Adam Driver, have further shaped his distinctive presence in American cinema.<\/p>\n \u201cNoah\u2019s tremendous,\u201d Sandler says. \u201cHis writing is just a collection of amazing words you get to say. Every line is exciting, and every mood he brings is interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike Sandler, who was born in Brooklyn to a schoolteacher and an electrical engineer, Clooney is from a well-known family. His father, Nick, was a TV news anchor in Cincinnati; his aunt Rosemary Clooney was the 1950s pop idol who starred alongside Bing Crosby in White Christmas. <\/p>\n George was a driver for her and her group of singers when he first got to Hollywood. \u201cThey would call themselves \u2018broads\u2019,\u201d he told the New York Times recently. \u201cThey would drink tall glasses of vodka. They were really tough and mean and raunchy. And when they got up to sing, they were unbelievably gifted.\u201d<\/p>\n But, as he also said, \u201cThen pop music changed, and she was out of business. She didn\u2019t handle it well and lost about 30 years on drugs and booze, being pretty angry at life. So I got to see fame from the when-it-doesn\u2019t-work-out side. It\u2019s a great lesson because you understand how little it has to do with you and that there is no success at all without massive amounts of failure.\u201d<\/p>\n The family have strong links with American politics. Nick Clooney ran for Congress as a Democrat in the elections of 2004, towards the end of his journalism career. (He turns 92 in January.) As a child, Rosemary and her sister, Betty, sang at rallies in Kentucky for their grandfather Andrew, a jeweller who was also a local politician.<\/p>\n Rosemary maintained the Democratic connection as an adult, eventually befriending John F Kennedy; in 1968 she became an avid supporter of his brother Robert during his own run for the White House \u2013 and was waiting for him at the Los Angeles hotel where he was assassinated in June that year.<\/p>\n Her nephew, who hosted fundraisers for Barack Obama<\/a> during his presidential campaigns, has been one of the party\u2019s more prominent financial supporters of recent years. In 2024 he was also one of the first Democrats to publicly urge Joe Biden, in an op-ed<\/a> for the New York Times, to stand aside, so a fresh face could lead it into the race against Donald Trump.<\/p>\n In the wake of Clooney\u2019s article, the Daily Telegraph, among others, asked if he was gearing up for a presidential run himself, noting the actor\u2019s efforts in fundraising after natural disasters and, with Bono, lobbying the president of the World Bank to increase aid to Africa.<\/p>\n That never seemed likely. He certainly does a good job of seeming happy in his well-appointed stability.<\/p>\n There have been issues. In 2020 he expressed himself \u201csurprised and saddened\u201d when a Channel 4 investigation<\/a> revealed child labour at Guatemalan farms growing coffee for the Nespresso<\/a> brand he has long advertised.<\/p>\n But little dirt seems to stick to Clooney \u2013 who explained in 2013, for example, that he\u2019d spent most of the money he\u2019d earned from his Nespresso commercials \u201ckeeping a satellite over the border of North and South Sudan, to keep an eye on Omar al-Bashir\u201d, the dictator charged with war crimes at The Hague. Sudan was a long-standing interest: Clooney and his father had travelled there together in 2006 to make the documentary A Journey to Darfur.<\/p>\n The actor glides into the second quarter of the 21st century with the latter-day, old-school movie-star sheen undiminished. Speaking with Sandler, he gives the impression of living the least hectic of lives. The arrival of the twins prompted him to put his career as a director on hiatus.<\/p>\n \u201cDirecting means 10 months on the road,\u201d Clooney says. \u201cSo directing right now is not something I can do any more, because I\u2019ve got kids and I\u2019ve got to be home. I want to be there for all of that.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a lot easier to make those decisions later in life when you\u2019ve succeeded. It\u2019s a lot harder for people who have to make those decisions when they\u2019re trying to make their mark. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen I\u2019m making a movie … you get one phone call where your kid\u2019s upset, and you just go, \u2018What am I doing here? I\u2019ve got to get home.\u2019 But leaving at that point means 250 people are unemployed, so it\u2019s complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n That would never have been Clooney\u2019s style. He has a reputation as the most reliable of professionals. Jay Kelly closes with an intertextual tribute to that arc: a montage that takes in Clooney\u2019s most admired performances, notably in The Thin Red Line, Michael Clayton, Up in the Air and The Descendants. <\/p>\n That, the actor says, is where the similarities between him and the less dependable, more remorseful Kelly begin and end. <\/p>\n \u201cPeople say, \u2018You\u2019re just playing yourself,\u2019 and it\u2019s not really in any way factual, because I\u2019m not a guy who lives with regret.\u201d<\/p>\n Jay Kelly is in cinemas now and on Netflix from Friday, December 5th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jay Kelly is having a bad week. In fact the veteran movie star is enduring a series of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207791,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[23388,24123,18,117,23700,10232,19733,19,17,60104,127,23390,7012,1341,39012],"class_list":{"0":"post-207790","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-adam-sandler","9":"tag-amal-clooney","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-eve-hewson","13":"tag-george-clooney","14":"tag-greta-gerwig","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-nespresso","18":"tag-netflix","19":"tag-noah-baumbach","20":"tag-oscars","21":"tag-paul-thomas-anderson","22":"tag-steven-soderbergh"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115637972441563488","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Jay](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/FNR3P4SEDJC55NGEAJXPIIAMCM.jpg\")
Jay Kelly: George Clooney in Noah Baumbach’s film. Photograph: Peter Mountain\/Netflix <\/p>\n![\"Jay](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/LDF5NEZLP5EO5FIR4STX6R2XW4.jpg\")
Jay Kelly: Eve Hewson with Charlie Rowe, as young Jay. Photograph: Netflix <\/p>\n![\"Clooney](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/AUO6FJVLGMXXAPHLX32MJF4BXI.jpg\")
Clooney Foundation for Justice: George Clooney with his wife, Amal, at their organisation’s awards ceremony in London in October. Photograph: Neil Hall\/EPA <\/p>\n![\"Lake](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/CK5S5BGH4VFHVGEX337RH6YESY.jpg\")
Lake Como: Villa Oleandra in 2006, a few years after George Clooney bought the house. Photograph: Giuseppe Cacace\/AFP\/Getty <\/p>\n![\"Roseanne:](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/NWMT2I2QDJBCFNKDUOIM2K7O7M.jpg\")
Roseanne: George Clooney in the US sitcom in 1989. Photograph: ABC\/Disney\/Getty <\/p>\n![\"Good](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/CH7NGUEVLBH2VNGZ2X5K6R6AME.jpg\")
Good Night, and Good Luck: George Clooney in the stage adaptation of his film, in March this year. Photograph: Sara Krulwich\/New York Times <\/p>\n![\"Punch-Drunk](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/ACXSQQNWINHPBLVDF3VXEAH6LU.jpg\")
Punch-Drunk Love: Adam Sandler with Mary Lynn Rajskub and Emily Watson in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 film. Photograph: Bruce Birmelin\/Columbia Pictures <\/p>\n![\"Democratic](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/H5TGXAQOQBGJ3FE7I6FVAVW5EU.jpg\")
Democratic family: Nick Clooney, the actor’s father, during his run for Congress. Photograph: Ken Stewart\/Getty <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/UP63Q6UPXJCULC3TFCRYQTTFZI.jpg\")
A Journey to Darfur: Nick Clooney introduces in son during the premiere of their documentary. Photograph: Paul Morigi\/WireImage <\/p>\n