George Clooney is making it his mission to charm the entire Lido at this year’s Venice Film Festival and is, so far, succeeding.
It’s a task the actor-filmmaker has accomplished many a time before, including in 2005 with Good Night, and Good Luck, which premiered at the Italian festival to great acclaim and won Venice’s screenplay prize, solidifying Clooney’s reputation as a competent director.
The Hollywood icon, who picked up the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Wednesday night and made a powerful speech as he collected the honor, covered a broad range of topics at a Venice masterclass on Thursday, chief among them politics, his career, his wife, Amal, and the death of the movie star.
Early on in the session, he spoke a little about his role — the smooth-talking escaped convict Ulysses Everett McGill — in the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), a film that Joel and Ethan Coen described to Clooney as being about “a trilogy of idiots.” The star said: “The first day I was shooting, I did the scene, and then Joel came over. He goes, ‘[Your character thinks he] is the smartest guy in every room you walk in.’ And of course, because all idiots think they’re brilliant, right? It’s simply the truth,” he said. “Look, we have a president [like that],” he added, prompting laughter from the audience. “They think they’re brilliant. So it changes how you perform it, right?”
A little later, Clooney was asked again about politics, but this time in the context of the charity set up with Amal Clooney, a British-Lebanese international human rights lawyer, called the Clooney Foundation for Justice.
He began by saying his father, 92-year-old journalist, host and anchorman Nick Clooney, used to tell him that his son’s responsibility in life was “to challenge people with more power than you and to defend people with less power than you. If you do nothing else,” said Clooney, “you’re successful. I fail often, but I try to do that.”
The A-lister conceded that he is lucky by birth (though he joked it was tricky growing up as a liberal in Kentucky). “There’s an awful lot of people who didn’t get those same kinds of moments of luck. You’re born in a war zone. You’re born in a place of hunger. You’re born in a place where women are treated terribly, or journalists are imprisoned, and those people need some luck. And so our job is to be part of that solution.”
He said he worked on bringing attention to the 2003 genocide in Darfur, Sudan, and “that he tried to make it very loud for a long time. […] And then, 20 years later, my wife finally puts some of these guys on trial and gets them thrown in jail,” he said about Clooney’s success as a lawyer. “By the way, my wife’s the only person to have ever put ISIS on trial and won. She’s a badass, and she gets the job done,” he told the room, earning thunderous applause. “We do it for our families. We do it for our friends.”
He added that he braces against people saying “shut up” to actors talking out about human rights and political issues. “I didn’t give away my freedom of speech the minute I became an actor. It also means that people can get mad at you and not like you anymore. Fair enough. That’s how this works. You can’t demand freedom of speech and then say, ‘But don’t say bad shit about me.’ Right? That’s the deal.” Clooney added: “I get mean tweets from the President of the United States. That’s okay. I can handle it. I’ll do all right. I’ll be fine. But that’s part of life.”
Clooney was given the opportunity to gush even more about his partner, with whom he shares nine-year-old twins, when an attendee asked if her background as a legal bigwig ever weighs in on his taking roles. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “She reads the scripts before I’ll do them, but she doesn’t have any real take on that. Obviously, if there was something that was going to be demeaning to someone, I wasn’t probably going to do it. It’s not really who I am. I’m perfectly happy to play the bad guy and do that if that’s to point out a flaw.”
But he and Amal “have a lot of really interesting discussions,” he continued. “I remember when this young woman who was a victim of ISIS came to the house, [Iraqi human rights activist] Nadia Murad. We were in England, and Amal’s got a million cases going, and she said, ‘Do not let me take this case. I’ve got too much going on.’ I go, ‘I got it.’ And she went into the living room to talk to Nadia, and about four hours later, I came in and they were both sitting on the floor crying, and I said, ‘You’re taking the case,’ and she said, ‘Yeah.’ And it’s been 10 years of representing her, and Nadia eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize for [her work].”
Added Clooney: “Amal’s taken some very difficult stands over the years, and we’ve had to face some pretty heavy criticism based on that. I wrote an op-ed about President Joe Biden. I got some shit from that,” he said, saying that neither of them are afraid of backlash. “We have really interesting conversations around the table. But you know, we also have two nine-year-old kids, and we have a normal family life, and there’s a lot of laughing and a lot of love, and we’re very lucky, and we’re really aware of that.”
Clooney delighted the crowd across the entire masterclass, speaking about the different approaches of Meryl Streep (“she knew all the lines before the table reading”) and Julia Roberts (“she’d pick up the script, and go, ‘Oh, okay,’”) who both earned an Oscar nomination for the same film (Clooney served as a producer on it, 2013’s August: Osage County).
He was also asked about being one of Hollywood’s last movie stars, and Clooney swiftly brought up two of his idols and good friends, Gregory Peck and Paul Newman. “Movie stars were bigger than life at the time,” said Clooney. “They are absolutely inspirations to me, but we’re very different beasts now. The kinds of stars that exist now aren’t the same [and] aren’t at the same height. I strive to do the best work I can.”
In a feel-good end to the session, an aspiring actress and filmmaker stood up to shoot her shot and ask Clooney if she could use any of his contacts to get a foot in the door of the industry. “My partner Grant is here — not here today — but he’s here in Venice with me, and we’ll [get] your information. We’re going to shoot some stuff in Venice starting next year,” he told her, “so that might be something you’d be available for.” The room awarded his kindness with raucuous applause.
The 2026 Venice Film Festival runs Sep. 2-12.
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