The George Clooney scene that makes him “laugh every time”
In the early 1990s, George Clooney finally broke through to widespread acclaim after landing the role of Dr. Doug Ross in the hit NBC medical drama ER. This success soon allowed him to enter the film industry with an appearance in Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 action horror film From Dusk Till Dawn, where he starred alongside Quentin Tarantino. Gradually, Clooney’s career snowballed as he was scouted by Steven Soderbergh, David O. Russell, and the Coen brothers for a run of critically acclaimed films.
By the time Clooney hit the screens in the first of Soderbergh’s hit Ocean’s franchise reboot, he had well and truly arrived as a Hollywood heavyweight alongside his co-stars, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Julia Roberts. Since then, Clooney has enjoyed a host of movies spanning the genres from romantic comedy to military history.
Although Clooney has never been seen as a comedy actor as such, his cheeky, albeit handsome, smile has put him in good stead for humorous roles. This, coupled with his experience in ER, ostensibly won him the one-off role of Dr. Michael Mitchell in the first series of the hit sitcom Friends.
In a past interview recently posted by Entertainment Stories, Clooney picked out a scene from the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? as one of his funniest. Although the scene in the cult comedy is undeniably risible, Clooney’s personal memory of shooting it really gets his sides splitting.
“My goofy hick dance in O Brother, Where Art Thou? makes me laugh every time I see it because there was a choreographer there who’d come up and say, ‘I’d like to talk to you about a dance.’ And I was like, ‘I kind of have my own dance I wanna do. And he’s like, ‘No, no.’ and I go, ‘Oh yeah! [laughs]’”
“And when I did it, I just remember hearing the Coen Brothers, they laugh too loudly off-camera all the time, you know, and just hearing them both going, ‘HA, HA, HA,’ laughing will always be a great sense of joy for me.”
In O Brother, Where Art Thou? Clooney is joined on the cast by John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson as three escaped convicts who try to make a few bucks as country singers in the American South. The satirical movie is set during the Depression era but loosely follows the plot of Homer’s epic Greek poem, the Odyssey.
Watch George Clooney’s personally choreographed scene from the movie below.
