Jay Kelly is having a bad week. In fact the veteran movie star is enduring a series of upsets that coalesce into a fully fledged midlife crisis. His canine costar misses a cue; his younger daughter is leaving home to interrail around Europe; the director who gave him his big break has died; and a catch-up with an old chum descends into a bar brawl.
Luckily, Kelly is one of those big names who can rely on their agents and publicists to iron out all their problems.
It doesn’t seem like the kind of dependency that George Clooney, who plays Jay Kelly in Noah Baumbach’s new dramedy of that name, would know a huge amount about.
There are whispers of Clooney in the character he portrays: the aw-shucks charm, the matinee-idol swagger. But the real-life veteran movie star, who is nothing if not charming when he’s in London to talk about the film, never seems to have needed the sort of tolerant babysitting that Kelly’s agent – played by a hugely likable Adam Sandler – is forced to endure.
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Clooney seems to be the epitome of clean cut. He acts. He speaks out on issues he cares about. He has had successful business ventures, including as a founder of the Casamigos tequila company, which he sold his share in for more than $200 million. And he has committed to philanthropic endeavours that include underwriting – with his agent, as it happens – a series of US high schools that aim to produce a more diverse range of people to work in the film industry.
Nobody has dug up any stories about Clooney starting bar fights or, as he does in Baumbach’s film, causing havoc on trains.
“My agent is Bryan Lourd, who’s one of the great guys in the business,” Clooney says. “My relationship with him is nothing but admiration and respect. And I can tell you that because I’ve been in situations 25 years ago where none of that was true.”
The script for Jay Kelly, which Baumbach wrote with the English actor Emily Mortimer, draws heavily on the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries – the story of an aged Swedish academic travelling for an honorary degree – to dramatise the sad-dad, empty-nester energies of an ageing A-lister.
Flashbacks to happier times with Kelly’s first wife – played by Eve Hewson – and melancholic visits to his elder, estranged daughter punctuate a journey towards his own lifetime-achievement ceremony in Tuscany. He has an ulterior motive for attending: he is also tracking his younger daughter, Daisy, in the hope of rekindling their daddy-daughter dynamic.
“We’ve had people in history who were great people and also kind of lousy parents along the way,” Clooney says. “Can you fix things going back? I would hope so. I’ve often tried to repair things. I’ve come to people and said, ‘I didn’t handle that very well.’ And that’s good. You hope to be able to do that. But maybe not with your own kids.”
Clooney often plays down his stardom. When I met him in the depths of the pandemic, in late 2020, he was similarly keen to emphasise his ordinariness. “I can rewire lamps. I can still take the sink apart and put it back together,” he said then.
Perhaps not uncoincidentally, when he was a child, in Kentucky, his mother would slow down as they drove past things people had left out as refuse. “She’d see an old Singer sewing machine, fish it out of the pile, and take it home and wire it into a lamp,” he told Esquire magazine recently.
Clooney now lives mainly on a farm in Provence, in southern France, with his wife, Amal, the British human-rights lawyer, whom he married in 2014, and their twins, Ella and Alexander, who are eight, and speak Italian, and whom he drives around on a tractor.
The day the magazine visited the family, he had just fixed the motorised cover on their swimming pool by fishing a broken piece out of the mechanism. “I felt like a king! The kids are cheering, and I’m in the pool holding up the piece of plastic, going, Yeaahhh, that’s right!”
Clooney likes them to see him do what he saw his mum do.
“It’s important to me that they can survive,” he told the magazine.
“A good portion of my life growing up was on a farm, and as a kid I hated the whole idea of it,” he said. But now, for the children, “It’s, like, they’re not on their iPads, you know?”
Domaine du Canadel is not the kind of farm you’d find in Ireland, of course: it has 40 hectares (100 acres) of grapes and 1,200 olive trees.
The twins’ Italian is useful when the family are at their home on Lake Como – another of the half-dozen or so properties in a portfolio estimated to be worth about $50 million – where they go to relax.
Clooney has owned Villa Oleandra, the Lake Como house, since 2002. He had been riding back from lunch nearby with Gregory Peck, the Oscar-winning star of Roman Holiday and To Kill a Mockingbird, when his motorbike broke down. He knocked on the villa’s door for help, then ended up spending the afternoon in its garden, chatting to the owner, a member of the Heinz ketchup family.
Clooney ended up buying the house – which he apparently hadn’t yet stepped inside – for a reported €11.7 million. A few years later he spent another €8 million or so on Villa Margherita, next door, adding a bridge to connect them.
The 64-year-old first appeared on TV as long ago as 1978, as a teenage extra – he was in a scene in which he had to carry a barrel – in an NBC miniseries called Centennial, which was partly filmed in Kentucky.
That was around the time he worked cutting tobacco, for $3 an hour, sold insurance door to door and slept on friends’ floors while he auditioned for proper roles.
Gradually his CV grew to the point where it included a couple of episodes of Murder, She Wrote in the mid-1980s and a decent stint in the comedy Roseanne a few years later.
Then, in 1994, not long after his divorce from his first wife, Talia Balsam (the daughter of the veteran character actor Martin Balsam), ER delivered Clooney overnight stardom – at a relatively geriatric 33.
In the much-praised medical drama, which also gave us Julianna Margulies, he played the kindly paediatrician Doug Ross, ever breaking bad news with a gentle frown. Suddenly, the star of Return of the Killer Tomatoes was being touted as the most handsome man in the world.
It didn’t take long for big film roles to flow his way: he starred in From Dusk to Dawn, with Harvey Keitel, in One Fine Day, opposite Michelle Pfeiffer, and in the Steven Soderbergh movie Out of Sight, with Jennifer Lopez.
They were followed by Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remake and its sequels, in which he starred with Brad Pitt, as well as more personal projects, such as Good Night, and Good Luck, about the American television journalist Ed Murrow, which he wrote and directed, and which was nominated for six Oscars.
If for most of that time Clooney has personified the platonic ideal of a star, in the early 1980s, like many in Los Angeles then, he had brushes with chemical misuse. “I tried – I did blow and stuff,” he told Esquire. “I used to make jokes about how I did too many drugs, but the truth is, it was never a big issue for me at all.”
He nonetheless got through those early years largely unscathed.
“When you’re a young actor you start out and you do everything for free. You’re doing Equity Waiver theatre,” he says in London, referring to small American productions that neither require nor offer union pay and benefits.
“You’re doing all these things, and suddenly somebody’s going to pay you. You think, I can’t believe I’m making money. And so I don’t think you really have the luxury of saying, ‘Well, I don’t know if I’m really up for fame.’ Because you’re running headlong toward the next job. You’re not thinking about any of that. You’re just thinking, How do I keep working?”
Clooney’s recent, hugely successful turn in the Broadway adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck was, remarkably, his first time on stage since playing Sid Vicious in a 1986 production in Los Angeles.
He believes that his ability to stay grounded can be largely attributed to fame having arrived later in his life.
“I had the chance to figure out how to live life before I figured out how to be famous, and I don’t think this character did,” he says.
Adam Sandler, smiling beside Clooney, is inclined to agree. For all the anarchy of his on-screen antics, the comic is, famously, a solid family man – and a dependable character actor.
He and Clooney have known each other since the 1990s. Lorne Michaels, the producer behind Saturday Night Live, introduced them when Sandler was a regular on that American TV institution.
The show, which has never had much purchase in Ireland or Britain, remains a star-making factory in the United States: Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Tina Fey and Will Ferrell all started out under the SNL banner. Sandler was part of the comic troupe from 1993. Clooney first hosted two years after that.
Sandler’s performance is the best thing about Jay Kelly. The film is backed by Netflix, with which the comic has made a dozen monstrously successful (and monstrously critically mauled) comedies, including the Murder Mystery movies, with Jennifer Aniston.
Despite the brickbats, Sandler has previously broken into the awards-season conversation with impressive turns in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love and the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems. Jay Kelly sees the actor in another emotional wringer.
That’s not always as hard as you might imagine for someone who works in comedy – a genre we shouldn’t underestimate, Sandler says.
“Most stand-up comedians I’ve met, they live with this constant pressure, because the results are immediate. People come up to you all the time, like, ‘Be funny.’ And I can’t. I don’t usually rise to that. It’s tough. You’re trying to make everyone laugh, and sometimes you can’t.”
In common with the late Robin Williams, Sandler is arguably at his best in his straight roles. Though there are certainly laughs in Punch-Drunk Love, his turn as a deeply apprehensive small-time entrepreneur is a masterpiece in applied rage. Uncut Gems, one of the most stressful films you might ever see, depicts his gambling addict hurtling madly about an increasingly unhelpful New York.
Despite the endless worries heaped on him in Jay Kelly, his Ron Sukenick is an altogether less wired character.
The film is Sandler’s second collaboration with Baumbach, whose movies are defined by contemporary anxieties, neurotic humour, brittle relationships and literary dialogue. Collaborations with Greta Gerwig (with whom Baumbach worked so well that they’re now married), from Frances Ha to Barbie, and a recurring ensemble of actors, notably Ben Stiller and Adam Driver, have further shaped his distinctive presence in American cinema.
“Noah’s tremendous,” Sandler says. “His writing is just a collection of amazing words you get to say. Every line is exciting, and every mood he brings is interesting.”
Unlike Sandler, who was born in Brooklyn to a schoolteacher and an electrical engineer, Clooney is from a well-known family. His father, Nick, was a TV news anchor in Cincinnati; his aunt Rosemary Clooney was the 1950s pop idol who starred alongside Bing Crosby in White Christmas.
George was a driver for her and her group of singers when he first got to Hollywood. “They would call themselves ‘broads’,” he told the New York Times recently. “They would drink tall glasses of vodka. They were really tough and mean and raunchy. And when they got up to sing, they were unbelievably gifted.”
But, as he also said, “Then pop music changed, and she was out of business. She didn’t handle it well and lost about 30 years on drugs and booze, being pretty angry at life. So I got to see fame from the when-it-doesn’t-work-out side. It’s a great lesson because you understand how little it has to do with you and that there is no success at all without massive amounts of failure.”
The family have strong links with American politics. Nick Clooney ran for Congress as a Democrat in the elections of 2004, towards the end of his journalism career. (He turns 92 in January.) As a child, Rosemary and her sister, Betty, sang at rallies in Kentucky for their grandfather Andrew, a jeweller who was also a local politician.
Rosemary maintained the Democratic connection as an adult, eventually befriending John F Kennedy; in 1968 she became an avid supporter of his brother Robert during his own run for the White House – and was waiting for him at the Los Angeles hotel where he was assassinated in June that year.
Her nephew, who hosted fundraisers for Barack Obama during his presidential campaigns, has been one of the party’s more prominent financial supporters of recent years. In 2024 he was also one of the first Democrats to publicly urge Joe Biden, in an op-ed for the New York Times, to stand aside, so a fresh face could lead it into the race against Donald Trump.
In the wake of Clooney’s article, the Daily Telegraph, among others, asked if he was gearing up for a presidential run himself, noting the actor’s efforts in fundraising after natural disasters and, with Bono, lobbying the president of the World Bank to increase aid to Africa.
That never seemed likely. He certainly does a good job of seeming happy in his well-appointed stability.
There have been issues. In 2020 he expressed himself “surprised and saddened” when a Channel 4 investigation revealed child labour at Guatemalan farms growing coffee for the Nespresso brand he has long advertised.
But little dirt seems to stick to Clooney – who explained in 2013, for example, that he’d spent most of the money he’d earned from his Nespresso commercials “keeping a satellite over the border of North and South Sudan, to keep an eye on Omar al-Bashir”, the dictator charged with war crimes at The Hague. Sudan was a long-standing interest: Clooney and his father had travelled there together in 2006 to make the documentary A Journey to Darfur.
The actor glides into the second quarter of the 21st century with the latter-day, old-school movie-star sheen undiminished. Speaking with Sandler, he gives the impression of living the least hectic of lives. The arrival of the twins prompted him to put his career as a director on hiatus.
“Directing means 10 months on the road,” Clooney says. “So directing right now is not something I can do any more, because I’ve got kids and I’ve got to be home. I want to be there for all of that.
“It’s a lot easier to make those decisions later in life when you’ve succeeded. It’s a lot harder for people who have to make those decisions when they’re trying to make their mark.
“When I’m making a movie ... you get one phone call where your kid’s upset, and you just go, ‘What am I doing here? I’ve got to get home.’ But leaving at that point means 250 people are unemployed, so it’s complicated.”
That would never have been Clooney’s style. He has a reputation as the most reliable of professionals. Jay Kelly closes with an intertextual tribute to that arc: a montage that takes in Clooney’s most admired performances, notably in The Thin Red Line, Michael Clayton, Up in the Air and The Descendants.
That, the actor says, is where the similarities between him and the less dependable, more remorseful Kelly begin and end.
“People say, ‘You’re just playing yourself,’ and it’s not really in any way factual, because I’m not a guy who lives with regret.”
Jay Kelly is in cinemas now and on Netflix from Friday, December 5th
