The movie George Clooney hates most: “I was really bad”
Like many aspiring actors before and after him, George Clooney began his long climb up the acting ladder by starring in more than one shoddy horror movie with a budget that didn’t really do justice to the term ‘shoestring’.
Suffice to say, nobody will look back and fondly remember Grizzly II: Revenge, Return to Horror High, or Return of the Killer Tomatoes as high points of the actor’s career, but he holds a special level of scorn for the role that was intended to mark his big screen breakthrough.
Clooney’s stint as Dr Doug Ross on the smash hit medical drama ER turned him into a household name, with his roguishly handsome good looks and innate charisma singling him out as the cast member with the most potential to make the jump from the small screen to cinema, a transition that was a great deal more difficult then than it is now.
Robert Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk till Dawn was an early example of the smouldering presence Clooney could be in the right feature-length project, and he thought he was off to the races when he was hired to replace Val Kilmer as the ‘Dark Knight’ in Joel Schumacher’s blockbuster superhero sequel Batman & Robin.
Unfortunately, the movie was an unmitigated disaster on every front, with Clooney making a concerted effort in the aftermath to focus on the best projects, as opposed to the ones that would pay the most money, had the highest earning power, or gained him the most visibility.
He’s become famous for crapping all over Batman & Robin for decades, and that extends to both the film as a whole and his performance in it, which he’s been happy to remind everyone wasn’t exactly up to scratch. “With hindsight it’s easy to look back at this and go, whoa, that was really shit, and I was really bad in it,” he admitted in one interview.
“The truth is, my phone rang, and the head of Warner Bros said, ‘Come into my office. You are going to play Batman in a Batman film,’ and I said, ‘Yeah!’ I called my friends, and they screamed, and I screamed, and we couldn’t believe it! I just thought the last one had been successful, so I thought I was just going to be in a big successful franchise movie,” Clooney explained. “In a weird way I was. Batman is still the biggest break I ever had, and it completely changed my career, even if it was weak and I was weak in it. It was a difficult film to be good in. I don’t know what I could have done differently.”
He’s right in everything he says, but he was still convinced to return as Bruce Wayne 25 years later in The Flash for a surprise cameo, which continued on in the vein established by Batman & Robin by flopping at the box office.
