George Clooney and Brad Pitt on the set of Wolfs on February 14, 2023 in New York City. Photo / Getty Images
George Clooney and Brad Pitt on the set of Wolfs on February 14, 2023 in New York City. Photo / Getty Images
George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s almost 30-year friendship was precipitated by Princess Diana’s death, the Hollywood actors have revealed.
Pitt, 60, said his close friend and fellow Oscar winner “first stood out” to him when he made a speech criticising the press after Diana was killed in a car crash in 1997 while she was being pursued by paparazzi.
“We’ve been in Paris in those same chases”, Clooney, 63, told GQ during a joint cover interview with Pitt from Chateau Miraval, Pitt’s French vineyard.
“The hunt? I can’t tell you, I can’t describe it to anyone. It was insane. You would have nine cars following you. They’re waiting for you,” Pitt said.
The Fight Club actor added: “Oh my God. And you stop at a stoplight and they all get out and it’s flash-flash-flash-flash-flash-flash.
“And you can’t see anything, and you can’t move because you’re trapped between cars at a stoplight. It’s a horrible feeling.
“It’s really invasive to know people are out there and they’re hiding in the bushes. It’s really a s*****, s***** feeling. And so George got up and commented on that after Princess Diana. And that’s when I saw: this guy’s got something that the rest of us don’t. Like, I saw the leader in that moment.”
Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed (both partially visible in back seat), bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones (front, left) and driver Henri Paul, in their Mercedes-Benz S280, shortly before the fatal crash which killed Diana, Fayed and Paul, Paris, August 31, 1997.
After Diana’s death, Clooney accused magazines and newspapers of turning photographers into “bounty hunters” by buying their pictures of celebrities.
He told reporters at the Screen Actors Guild office in Los Angeles at the time: “If you weren’t hiding behind the profession of journalism, you would be an accomplice to a crime, and you would go to jail.”
Elsewhere in the GQ cover interview, Pitt likened being famous to being a “gazelle” being pursued in the animal kingdom.
“You watch those nature documentaries. There’s that one gazelle that gets cut off. And then the lions and then the cheetahs are chasing him. And then afterward if they escape, they go through the trauma, the shakes,” he said.
Clooney added that while some celebrities were able to walk around cities such as New York without being followed, the interest in him, Pitt, and around four other stars had “never subsided”.
He said the interest was so intense he would avoid going to the hospital for things you would usually seek medical attention for.
“I have a goal of trying to protect, I don’t want pictures of my kids. We deal in very serious subject matters, with very serious bad guys, and we don’t want to have photos of our kids out there,” he said.
“So we have to work hard at trying to stay private, and it’s tricky, as you can imagine. There’s times you will avoid going to the hospital with something that you would normally go to the hospital for.”
He added: “You will assess how bad something is before you go.”
The actors also discussed ageing.
Clooney said he told his wife, Amal Clooney, “it doesn’t matter how many granola bars I eat. In 20 years, I’m 80″, adding: “That’s a real number where your bones are brittle and your muscle mass is gone. So s*** changes.”
President Joe Biden was urged by George Clooney to drop out of the Presidential race. Photo / Getty Images
Clooney also described how he was a “little irritated” by Quentin Tarantino for refusing to describe him as a “movie star” in a recent interview.
“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 f****** career.’”
Pitt also revealed he was criticised by Alcoholics Anonymous for speaking publicly about attending meetings.
Pitt said the group “came down on me” for talking about his experience.”
“They were like ‘It’s anonymous.’ I was like ‘Well yeah, but if I want to…’.”
Pitt has spoken about his experience attending “freeing” all-male Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings several times over the past five years.
After his ex-wife Angelina Jolie filed for divorce in 2016, Pitt said went to AA sessions for a year-and-a-half.
Once Hollywood’s golden couple, the two actors separated in 2016 after Pitt was accused of being drunk and aggressive on a plane during a family trip from France to California.
“I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” Pitt told the New York Times in 2019 about his decision to become sober.
Speaking about his recovery group, the father of six said: “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard.
“It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself.”
He added: “It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself. There’s great value in that.”
Speaking about the experience again in 2022, Pitt told GQ magazine: “I had a really cool men’s group here that was really private and selective, so it was safe.”
He added: “Because I’d seen things of other people who had been recorded while they were spilling their guts and that’s just atrocious to me.”
