George Clooney has said that his decision to base himself in France was informed by the desire to give his children a better start in life than if they had remained in the US.
The actor, 64, who has eight-year-old twins, Ella and Alexander, with his wife, the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, gave a lengthy interview to US Esquire magazine while staying at his Italian villa on Lake Como.
“We live on a farm in France,” he said. “A good portion of my life growing up was on a farm, and as a kid I hated the whole idea of it. But now, for [the twins], it’s like – they’re not on their iPads, you know? They have dinner with grownups and have to take their dishes in.
“They have a much better life. I was worried about raising our kids in LA, in the culture of Hollywood. I felt like they were never going to get a fair shake at life. France – they kind of don’t give a shit about fame. I don’t want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don’t want them being compared to somebody else’s famous kids.”
Clooney’s father, Nick, now 91, was a local TV anchor in Cincinnati and the actor reflected that the age gap between himself and his own children means that similar comparisons will be harder to draw.
“The only thing I feel lucky about is that I’m so much older that the idea that my son would be compared to me is pretty unlikely, because by the time he actually will have done anything, I’m gonna be gumming my bread.”
He also spoke about his desire to ensure his children were self-sufficient, through encouraging them to help out in the grounds and witness his handyman skills fixing, variously, a fan belt (using a pair of his wife’s stockings), a coffee machine and the automated cover for the swimming pool. “It’s important to me that they can survive,” he said.
Clooney said that his experience on Broadway earlier this year in a stage version of 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck, was made considerably more stressful by his age.
“As you get older, it doesn’t matter how many granola bars you eat; your brain starts to lock up,” he said. “I had all these long monologues, and I was afraid of blowing my lines. So every single night for 100 performances, I would do the whole play in the dressing room before I went onstage. I was so terrified.”
Clooney is currently promoting Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach’s film in which he stars as a Clooney-esque film star reassessing his life ahead of a lifetime achievement tribute. Making the movie, said Clooney, also caused him to look back at the highs and lows of his own career, and the impact it had had on his own health and family.
He told Esquire that although never addicted to alcohol, he had “runs where I’d get pretty toasty every night” as well as having dabbled in cocaine during the early 1980s.
“At the time, it was like, ‘No, this is not like heroin. It’s not addictive.’ But then it was like, ‘Oh, well, it’s actually pretty fucking bad.’ Plus, it was all cut with mannitol. The baby laxative. Everybody would do a line and then take a shit.”
Watching film classics from the same period with his wife had also caused him to reassess that time, he said, recalling a viewing of Animal House, which he billed as a film with “no equal”.
“She said: ‘Well, let’s watch it.’ I go, ‘I don’t know if it’s going to hold up.’ Like, the first scene, a 13-year-old girl passes out and the devil pops up on the guy’s shoulder and says, ‘Fuck her brains out!’ And my wife’s looking at me like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is terrible!’”
