He is making his Broadway debut with a stage version of his 2005 movie Good Night, and Good Luck. He’s ready, but also terrified.
George Clooney has been sneaking outside to smoke.
Not like his friend Barack Obama used to, when he was running for President and his wife, Michelle, was after him to quit. Clooney doesn’t even like smoking.
“I had to get better at inhaling,” he said. “I go outside so the kids don’t see and smoke a little bit.” He plans to switch to herbal cigarettes when he makes his Broadway debut this month in a stage adaptation of his 2005 movie, Good Night, and Good Luck.
Smoking has been unpleasant, he said, because in his Kentucky clan “eight uncles and aunts all died of lung cancer – it’s a big deal”. He noted that his aunt Rosemary Clooney, the torch singer and movie star, was 74 when she died in 2002 from complications of lung cancer. “My dad’s the only one that didn’t smoke, and he’s 91.”
Clooney sat on a rose-coloured couch late January at Casa Cipriani, a hotel in Manhattan. He would sit there for the next five hours, spinning ensorcelling tales about love, Hollywood and politics like a modern-day Scheherazade.
Unlike in the film, where he took on the non-smoking role of Fred Friendly, producer of CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, on Broadway Clooney will play Murrow, who had a three-pack-a-day habit and died in 1965 at the age of 57 of complications from lung cancer. A decade before his death, Murrow was one of the first to report on links between smoking and lung cancer on his show, See It Now.
When Clooney directed his acclaimed movie, anti-smoking organisations chided him about David Strathairn’s Murrow character incessantly smoking.
“I was like, ‘Well, they all died of lung cancer – you can’t not do what is factually true,’” he recalled. His interest in what is factually true – and how Americans no longer start with the same fact base – has led him back to a time when the country regarded some top TV news people as moral authorities.
Murrow bonded with radio listeners during World War II by broadcasting from London amid the blitz, and then with early television watchers interviewing celebrated figures like John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt. On See It Now, Murrow challenged the powerful – most famously Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose name became an “ism” when he indiscriminately smeared and spewed poison, searching for communists.
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. … We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason,” Murrow said in his attack on McCarthy.
Clooney and his longtime collaborator Grant Heslov wrote the movie and the play. They had conceived of the movie as a live production for CBS, like Clooney’s redo in 2000 of the Henry Fonda movie, Fail Safe.
“I was always excited by the risk of no net,” said Clooney, who also lobbied to do a live episode of ER when he played dreamboat Dr Doug Ross on the NBC hit. But after Justin Timberlake tore Janet Jackson’s costume and exposed her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, CBS executives lost their taste for taking risks with live TV. Clooney had to mortgage his house to help finance the black-and-white film, which received six Oscar nominations, including for best screenplay.
Clooney had intended to play Murrow, but after the table reading, he told Heslov, “I don’t have the gravitas”. Heslov agreed. Murrow had “the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Heslov said in a phone interview, “and at that time George didn’t have it”.
Now, two decades later, at 63, Clooney is ready. “I always felt like there was a sadness to Murrow, and that was not something that you could associate with me at 40 years old,” he said.
Clooney said the stage will be transformed into a newsroom with about 30 monitors moving around, showing old footage. David Cromer, the play’s Tony Award-winning director, enlisted video and projection designer David Bengali, to help, as Cromer put it, “re-create what it’s like to watch television being made”.
Clooney and Heslov started out together as actors in Los Angeles, doing plays in tiny theatres. One called The Biz, directed by Clooney’s cousin Miguel Ferrer, was about actors trying to make it. And Clooney acted in a play about Sid Vicious called Vicious in 1986. He hasn’t trod the boards since then.
Almost four decades later, Heslov and Clooney walked onstage at the Winter Garden Theatre, where the show starts previews March 12. Heslov said, “We were both, like, ‘Wow!’”
The thought of being on Broadway, Clooney conceded, is daunting.
“I’m terrified of it,” he said. “Are you kidding? I’m doing 11 monologues. When you get older, your recall isn’t the same. When I was doing ER, it was 12 pages of medical dialogue. You look at it in the morning and you say, ‘Okay, let’s go!’ Now you get older and you’re going, ‘What’s wrong with me? Well, don’t drink any wine tonight.’”
He said he co-wrote the movie as a critique of most of the press rolling over ahead of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Clooney called out President George W. Bush for the misbegotten war, and he was called a traitor for being against it.
The movie, he said, was really about: “We need the press” because “government unchecked is a problem”.
Now, with President Donald Trump throwing Washington into a tumult, Clooney said, we are living through a time when “You take a narrative; you make it up; don’t worry about facts; don’t worry about repercussions”. He said the play “feels more like it’s about truth, not just the press. Facts matter”.
Certainly, there are unavoidable echoes of McCarthy’s Washington in Trump’s Washington, a place rife with “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway called them, as well as conspiracy theories, reckless attacks and punitive measures.
He doesn’t know if the audience will see his play as a critique of Trump. “I think they are going to like hearing the conversations about us at our best,” he said. “Murrow represented us at our best.”
Clooney has been wooed by some top Democrats to run for President. Would he ever jump in?
“No,” he said, somewhat convincingly.
In a world with few moral authorities, Clooney hearkens back not only to Murrow but also to his father, Nick Clooney, an anchorman in Kentucky and later an AMC host, who would call out people at dinner if they belittled anybody or said anything bigoted, and then leave the table.
As a child, George Clooney recalled, “I would always be like, ‘Well, can’t you just not hear, so we can finish eating?’ The truth is, of course, he was right. He and my mum taught us, ‘You’ve got to do it when it’s uncomfortable.’”
Nick Clooney liked to stand on a chair and recite Murrow’s “Wires and Lights in a Box” speech, about how television was becoming not a tool to inform but a toy to distract – an argument that augured the internet age. Now the tech moguls have superseded the network moguls; they control communication – and to a large extent emotions – in America. Clooney, who has no social media presence, said he sees “a lot of cowardice” as the tech moguls bow to Trump.
Clooney tried to inculcate his father’s values. He struggled for years to bring awareness to the conflict and the famine in Darfur. Amid other charity work, he started the Clooney Foundation for Justice with his wife, Amal, a human rights lawyer, to “wage justice” and help victims of human rights abuses, while dropping the hammer on perpetrators.
In June, Clooney and Obama appeared at a glittery LA fundraiser that raised US$28 million ($50m) for President Joe Biden. When Biden appeared to freeze onstage, Obama led him away. Clooney was gobsmacked.
“I saw him for hours a year earlier at the Kennedy Center, and I saw someone much less sharp” that night, Clooney said. “I’ve always liked Joe Biden, and I like him still.”
But after Biden’s debate meltdown, Clooney wrote a guest essay for The New York Times urging Biden to step aside.
Biden abdicated his responsibility by hiding his incapacities, Clooney told me, and “the media, in many ways, dropped the ball”.
Clooney arrived in New York in late January with Amal and his 7-year-old twins, Alexander and Ella. They have a place in England and a home in Kentucky near his parents. But their main residence is now a farm in France.
“Growing up in Kentucky, all I wanted to do was get away from a farm, get away from that life,” he said. “Now I find myself back in that life. I drive a tractor and all those things. It’s the best chance of a normal life.”
And how was the transition from glamorous bachelor to husband and father?
“I wasn’t really in the market for being a dad,” he said. “Then I met Amal, and we fell in love. I have to say that, after that, everything made sense.”
Clooney is conscious of time passing. “I had this conversation with Amal when I turned 60,” he said. “I said, ‘Look, I can still play full-court basketball. I can still run around. I can still do pretty much everything I did when I was 30. But in 30 years, I’m 90. That’s a real number. My dad just hit that. And there are some things you’re not doing no matter how many granola bars you eat. I told Amal, ‘We have to focus on the next 20, 25 years of making sure that we’re jamming in everything we can.’ Not just work, because no one at the end of their life goes, ‘God, I wish I worked more.’”
He got more contemplative. “There’s a thing about finding the person that you needed to find, particularly at a certain age, and everything from then on is easy.”
“We renovated our house,” he continued. “Amal would go, ‘I want to paint this wall yellow.’ Well, if I was 27 years old and doing construction work, I would’ve been like, ‘Well, that’s a stupid colour.’ But the truth of the matter is that at 60, you just go, ‘Okay.’ There are so many things that would have caused friction that don’t.”
Clooney may not like yellow walls, but he’s staying sunny. “I got the brass ring,” he said. “It all worked out. If I go outside and I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I’d be okay.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Maureen Dowd
Photographs by: Thea Traff
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
