The furious argument that almost cost George Clooney everything: “I thought that was the end of my career”
George Clooney pretty much sits at the pinnacle of Hollywood these days; he is not just one of the highest-paid actors in the business, but an Academy Award-winning producer and Oscar-nominated director too. He’s about as important as they come. And yet, had you known him in the mid-1980s, you would never have staked even a penny on it happening.
That’s because, despite being the son of a major network anchorman and a distant relation of Abraham Lincoln, for that matter, Clooney was not a nepo baby and not guaranteed a career in entertainment. In fact, he was a wannabe baseball player with Bell’s palsy at the end of the 1970s, taking on odd jobs selling shoes and insurance, before, in desperation, he decided to try to be a television extra.
Battling against his condition, which can leave the sufferer with half of their face paralysed, Clooney could barely get noticed by anyone, only landing four small parts in four years until he managed to get cast on a medical series with Elliott Gould called E/R, which, despite being set in a hospital in Chicago, was not the ER for which he would later become known.
Although he made eight episodes of the show, it didn’t translate into any more success, and an event while appearing on another little-watched TV show almost proved to be the last straw for Clooney in terms of his acting dreams.
He told W Magazine, “About ten years in, I got in an argument with an executive producer. I was the third or fourth banana on a TV show, and I had to leave. I thought that was the end of my career.”
Clooney added, “I wasn’t in a position of power, but I wasn’t going to be spoken to the way that I was. I told him to knock it off. He yelled at me. I yelled back. It’s still debatable whether I was fired or I quit. But someone who I had helped out years earlier read that I’d been fired. He brought me in for an audition and gave me a pilot. That kept me in town.”
Although Clooney did another 17 episodes of a show called The Facts of Life, he was still doing B-movies like Return of the Killer Tomatoes by the end of the decade, and it was only thanks to picking up a recurring role in Roseanne, which at that point was one of the most-watched shows in America, that his fortunes began to change.
He went to acting school for five years to properly learn his trade, and it paid off when he was cast on ER in 1994, the show that would make him a household name, becoming one of the most-watched series in history. He was twice-Emmy nominated for his performance as Doug Ross, and three-time Golden Globe-nominated too.
It sparked a 30-year career on stage and screen that will this September see Clooney handed a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival. He’s currently working on a long-awaited fourth movie in the Ocean’s franchise, which will see him team up with fellow Hollywood royalty Matt Damon and Brad Pitt.
