September 27, 2006
This is how one of George Clooney's typical weeks looks. On the day of our interview, he was in Los Angeles. Then he was to fly to New York so he, his father Nick and Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel could address the UN Security Council on the need for urgent intervention in Darfur.
The weekend before, Clooney flew back across the country to Las Vegas, to resume shooting on Ocean's Thirteen. Soon, Clooney will also be promoting two new movies.
That's not all. At this point, Clooney is not just an A-list Hollywood actor. He has a burgeoning career as a director and is one of the hottest producers in town.
In Clooney's case, his other ventures seem to centre ever more around international politics. Since a trip to Darfur in April, he has become the most visible public face entreating the international community to intervene before the genocide already under way turns into a calamity on the scale of Rwanda in 1994 - or worse. Even before he became an advocate for Darfur, he was also involved in the ONE campaign and travelled to last summer's G8 summit in Gleneagles alongside Bono and Bob Geldof. In the US, he has made no bones about being an outspoken voice for liberal Hollywood and earned himself the epithet "traitor" in conservative circles after he cast doubt on the wisdom of invading Iraq.
In short, Clooney has evolved in every imaginable direction since he first hit the big time in the mid-1990s as Doctor Doug Ross in ER and acquired the reputation of being the sexiest man alive.
He used to complain about entertainment journalists being interested only in who he was dating. These days, though, the problem tends not to arise - there is so much more to talk about. Essentially, what Clooney has done is to use his celebrity as a weapon to further all sorts of causes bigger than himself. It has enabled him to make unconventional, overtly political films of a kind that would normally prompt the big Hollywood players to run as far away as possible.
Nothing, perhaps, captures his journey from the self-absorbed world of Hollywood to the international stage better than his experiences over a few short weeks in February and early March when he was immersed in two Oscar campaigns - one for his supporting role as CIA operative Bob Barnes in Syriana, the other for his direction of Good Night, and Good Luck.
"It's really a campaign," he says, "shaking a lot of hands and meeting a lot of people. The longer you do it, the worse you feel. Here you are, patting yourself on the back for your work and you'd rather be doing the work. Sure, it's flattering and you're (doing) it for the good of the film, but it makes you feel a little strange."
At the same time, he was reading reports in the New York Times, warning that Darfur and neighbouring areas of Chad were on the verge of a genocidal catastrophe unless the outside world intervened
. He talked the subject over with his father, a former TV news anchor. The elder Clooney was in no doubt that what Darfur needed was celebrity glamour.
Neither had previously travelled to sub-Saharan Africa and the trip proved trickier than they first thought. In mid-April, Chad's president, Idriss Déby, was almost overthrown in a coup attempt that left more than 300 people dead in the capital, N'Djamena - where the Clooneys were hoping to land.
"I was ready to bail out," Clooney recalls. "Then my dad said: 'I think it's now or never.' So I thought: 'Screw it, I'm 45 and don't have kids. My dad is 72. If anybody should go, it should be us.'"
"I'm not a journalist," Clooney says, "but I can give others the opportunity to do their job as journalists. Often, that's what they want to do more than anything. But editors have a tough time selling space for stories like that - unless a celebrity becomes involved. This seemed like a good place to spend the celebrity credit I'd been racking up all spring campaigning for my Oscar."
Clooney was very clear what his role at the UN was. "I'm not there to create policies. When I get up in front of the Security Council, I say I'm not pretending to try to educate any of you on Africa, or on Darfur. I'm just here to ask you to do what you can."
"Celebrities who espouse causes - that's not new. In the past we've pushed war bonds, and run telethons. We've been able to bring awareness." Likewise, political films have defined certain moments in American history. "We're not first responders for the most part: it takes a year and a half to get a film out there. But, every once in a while, we do find ourselves having to be the voice."
For reasons of luck as well as personal passion, Clooney has been involved in some of the most compelling political films of recent years. Clooney is a big believer in bringing nuance to characters and political positions, because films need to be about well-written characters and scripts, not easy points-scoring.
"The more strident you are, the less able to you are to appeal to people on the fence. A lot of my friends are very opinionated and I tend to agree with them, but I wouldn't want to make a movie with them."
For all his pride in wearing the liberal Hollywood badge, Clooney is also remarkably good at building bridges to the unlikeliest of political allies and giving credit to his ideological adversaries when he feels they deserve it.
"I have my beliefs but I also believe that the idea of enforcing any of those beliefs on anyone in a political world is very dangerous," Clooney says. "It's the reason we left King George and started the American Revolution. We insisted everyone can pick their own religion. Myself, I'm still working on mine." - The Independent
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