When George Clooney made an enemy of the Hungarian prime minister: “He has people whispering in his ears”
For better or worse, there’s been a direct correlation between acting and politics in place for decades, at least in the United States. George Clooney may never have displayed a vested interest in running for office, but he is known for being outspoken in his beliefs, which once angered the prime minister of Hungary.
Nobody could have guessed that Ronald Reagan would end up sitting in the Oval Office when he was starring in a procession of B-level genre films, just like there wasn’t a soul who could have predicted the thick-accented star of The Terminator would be overseeing one of the world’s largest economies less than two decades later on from telling the audience he’d be back.
Clint Eastwood had a short mayoral stint in California, Jesse Ventura was the governor of Minnesota for a while, and then there’s Home Alone 2 and The Little Rascals cast member Donald Trump. With that in mind, maybe it’s not unexpected for a two-time Academy Award-winning actor and filmmaker to ruffle transatlantic feathers, looking at how unpredictably predictable the cross-pollination has always been.
Tossing another curveball into the mix, it all started when Clooney was promoting his 2020 sci-fi drama The Midnight Sky, which streamed exclusively on Netflix. When reflecting on how the themes of the story were relevant to the modern world, he invoked the name of Viktor Orbán, who’s been Hungary’s PM since 2010.
“Go to Bolsonaro in Brazil or Orbán in Hungary, or look around: lots of anger and hate,” he said to GQ. “If you played it out, this takes place in 2049; if you played it out 30 years, this could very well be what our reality is if that kind of hate is allowed to fester.”
Not one to sit idly by and let himself be insulted by the worst Batman ever, foreign affairs spokesman Tamas Menczer decried Clooney’s comments as “foolish” before suggesting his opinion had been influenced by the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, a noted opponent of Orbán’s policies.
“George Clooney is a good actor, so deserves respect,” the state-approved response offered. “But nobody should treat him like a global political oracle. He has people whispering in his ears.” The tete-a-tete wasn’t done there, either, with the star firing another shot across the bows.
Explaining that he’d only met Soros once and “the Orbán propaganda machine is lying, full stop,” Clooney signalled that he had no intentions of ever returning to the country while his newfound nemesis remained in charge, but he’d nonetheless “look forward to the day that Hungary embraces what it once was.”
Presumably, Clooney isn’t even welcome in Hungary until Orbán is no longer in power after igniting their feud, but he seems perfectly happy with that arrangement.
