Why George Clooney turned down the once-in-a-lifetime chance to work with his idol: “This is it”
With acting careers having no fixed expiry date, Hollywood is a place where stars of the current generation frequently get the opportunity to work with the legends who inspired them. George Clooney had that chance once and once only, and he turned it down.
On paper, you’d assume that any actor, no matter how high or low their position on the industry ladder, wouldn’t think twice about accepting a role that would allow them to collaborate with one of their biggest and most pronounced influences, especially when that person is an icon of the silver screen.
Clooney initially agreed, but when he really started to think about it, he got cold feet. He’s never come across as a particularly shy, retiring, or nervous man, but as soon as he realised he would be playing a younger version of an all-time great, even his self-confidence began to seriously waver.
It’s a comparison that’s been following him around for years, and it only intensified when he became a close friend and frequent co-star of Brad Pitt, with the pair repeatedly being dubbed the Paul Newman and Robert Redford of the modern era. And yet, when all Clooney had to do to work with the man himself was sign a contract and show up on set, he backed out.
Not only that, but it would have turned one of the 21st century’s most beloved romances into a completely different animal. “We were going to do The Notebook together,” Clooney revealed. “Basically, I was going to play him as a young man, and it was funny. We met and said, ‘This is it. It’s going to be great.'”
As everyone who’s bawled uncontrollably over the movie knows all too well, Ryan Gosling played Noah Calhoun as a young man, with James Garner cast as the older version. In an alternate reality, though, the character would have been split between Clooney and Newman, until the former chickened out.
“He’s one of the handsomest guys you’ve ever seen,” he explained, although he’s hardly a munter himself. “We met up, and I said, ‘I can’t play you. I don’t look anything like you. This is insane’. We just wanted to do it because we wanted to work together, but it ended up being not the right thing for us to do.”
Instead, The Notebook trundled on through development hell until it was steered to the screen by Nick Cassavetes, who hired Gosling and Garner for the male lead, a duo who arguably look less alike than Clooney and Newman do, which renders his point somewhat moot, and how many times have movies cast two people as the same character who bear no resemblance? It feels like it happens every week.
That was the closest Clooney ever got to working with Newman, someone he’d admired from afar and then up close from the 1960s onward, but he bailed because he didn’t think he was handsome enough to convince as the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid figurehead’s younger self.
