George Clooney got the last laugh on the actor who called him a sellout: “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Russell Crowe and George Clooney were two of the biggest names of the 2000s, and between them, they dominated the box office, hoovered up awards, and adorned bedroom walls across the world.
However, despite their collective star power, they never starred in a film together, perhaps because their two egos couldn’t share the same room, maybe the right project just never came along, or maybe it’s because they were at the centre of one of the weirdest celebrity feuds of all time.
It all started when the Gladiator star put out a bizarre statement calling out the trio of Clooney, Harrison Ford, and Robert De Niro, as “sellouts”, something the silver-haired superstar wasn’t going to take lying down. Clooney fired back with his trademark dry wit, joking about forming a band with Ford and De Niro, which he said would have been a “bad use of celebrity”, in what was a direct shot at Crowe, who has his own band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts.
Enraged by Clooney’s barb, Crowe went full scorched earth. According to the Syriana star (via Esquire), this is when the New Zealand-born Oscar winner really started to go after him, saying of Clooney, “Who the fuck does this guy think he is? He’s a Frank Sinatra wannabe”. This was likely in reference to Clooney’s role in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, a character that was originally played by ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’, but also fit the strange musical theme of their spat.
After initially playing up their rivalry, Clooney decided that things had gone too far. If he is to be believed, he sent Crowe a note warning him of the consequences of his actions, with the memo reading, “Dude, the only people who succeed when two famous people are fighting is People magazine. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Things looked like they were going to come to a head at the 2006 Baftas when Clooney was up for four prizes, including twice in the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category, while Crowe was there to support his film Cinderella Man, which was nominated for ‘Best Original Screenplay’. You’d think that this would have led to sparks flying, but Crowe reached out ahead of the ceremony with an olive branch.
“He sends me a disc of his music and a thing of his poetry,” Clooney recalled, “I think he said, ‘I was all misquoted’, and I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever’. I did take it with me to the Baftas, but I didn’t win. I might have used it if I had won.”
As with all celebrity beefs, trying to make sense of Clooney vs Crowe is a tiring and ultimately pointless task. Here we have two very famous, very wealthy men using their platform to slag each other off for no good reason. It’s nice that they made peace in the end, but this whole incident was ridiculous from start to finish.
