George Clooney’s 10 best performances
If you were to ask someone who still embodies that classic old Hollywood essence, who omits that Golden Age glow, chances are you’ll be told: George Clooney. Classically handsome, sharply dressed, smart with his film choices and ageing more gracefully than most fine wines, the 62-year-old feels like he’s been transported straight out of the 1960s.
Along with the likes of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, Clooney firmly cemented himself as an acting tour de force by the mid-1990s and nimbly rode the transition of millennia without getting cast aside like so many actors. He has become the quintessential movie star, the definitive household name reminiscent of Paul Newman and Robert Redford from the previous century.
Whilst he’s focused on directing for the past few years, giving us ambitious sci-fi melodrama with The Midnight Sky in 2020 and the excellent Moehringer biopic The Tender Bar a year later, we’ve only seen Clooney reprise his on-screen presence with the romantic comedy Ticket To Paradise which was released last year, and the former Midnight Sky which marked the end of a four-year absence.
Clooney’s next film is scheduled for release this year; the Jon Watts-directed Wolves, which stars Clooney and Pitt as fixers who get assigned to the same job. With such star power in the two main leads, and a director fresh off the wave-making Spider-Man: No Way Home, Wolves is shaping up to be an absolute mammoth of a movie. In anticipation of Clooney’s newest offering as an actor, let’s take a look at his 10 greatest performances.
George Clooney’s 10 best performances
10. Welcome to Collinwood (The Russo Brothers, 2002)
Before they were breaking box-office records and re-shaping the entire theatrical landscape with Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, Joe and Anthony Russo were making debut indie features like any other shmuck. Welcome to Collinwood, the brothers’ first film, was a heist-comedy that followed a group of small-time Cleveland crooks who attempt to rob a jeweller.
The film has a fairly hefty cast, with the likes of Sam Rockwell and William H. Macy showing up, but Clooney makes a wonderful cameo appearance. He plays the safe-cracker Jerzy, enlisted for guidance on how to drill a safe, and he delivers his deadpan (and terrible) advice all from the confines of a wheelchair, which causes the gang to question his validity as a mastermind thief.
Despite making only a brief appearance, it’s a hysterically funny one that makes it a memorable Clooney moment.
9. Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002)
Four years after their first film and two years after forming a production company together, Clooney and Soderbergh re-united for the remake of Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel, Solaris, which had been famously adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972.
This American version, coming exactly three decades later, gave us Clooney as Dr. Chris Kelvin — a psychologist sent on a mission to the space station above the planet Solaris, in an attempt to bring the AWOL crew home. This weighty, intellectually-aspiring, psychological science-fiction film rests almost exclusively on his performance and whilst the film falls flat in some areas, particularly in comparison to Tarkovsky’s version, Clooney manages to carry the film with tenderness, emotion and grace.
8. Burn After Reading (The Coen Brothers, 2008)
This third collaboration with the Coen’s has Clooney demoted somewhat, taking a backseat against the action led mainly by Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand and John Malkovich in this ironic CIA caper.
It’s the relegation, however, that makes Clooney’s performance as the paranoid Marshall Harry Pfafer so funny and profound; we see him flitting at the peripherals of the main story as if he’s trying to claw his way into the main narrative and his moment of intersection with the main trio’s adventures results in a shocking but nonetheless hilarious moment with Brad Pitt’s character, a closet and a gun.
7. Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)
Asides from being a great performance in a great film, Clooney’s role as Jack Foley is particularly special for signifying the first in a fruitful collaboration between him and director Steven Soderbergh.
In this adaptation of cult pulp-writer Elmore Leonard’s book of the same name, released two years earlier, Clooney plays a foiled bank robber that kidnaps a US Marshall (played by Jennifer Lopez), who he ultimately starts to fall in love with. Slick, smooth and sly, this early performance by Clooney won him wide acclaim and boasted all the definitive trademarks of a bonafide movie star.
6. Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)
David O. Russell’s third feature was considered a miracle at the time; a writer/director had managed to produce his unique, darkly comic and aesthetically distinct film entirely through the studio system, from start to finish.
It also marked a consecutive knock-out for Clooney, whose confident and charismatic portrayal of Major Archie Gates provided an anchor for the film’s kinetic zaniness as it bounced from action to political satire to outright rage against the system. It also gave us a glimpse of Clooney’s ability to play authoritative characters overseeing a larger group, a dynamic best demonstrated by the next film but one he would continue to play in future films.
5. The Ides of March (George Clooney, 2011)
Operating behind the camera and on it, Clooney’s fourth film as a director featured both himself and Ryan Gosling in a political and psychological game of chess.
Playing the magnetic and captivating Mike Morris, Governor of Pennsylvania and aspiring presidential candidate, Clooney acted as the perfect foil to Gosling’s suspicious junior campaign aide. Offering up an initial air of wholesomeness, Clooney masterfully lets it transform into a toxic cloud of seediness and outright criminal behaviour.
4. Hail, Caesar! (The Coen Brothers, 2016)
Maybe the Coen Brothers know something about the actor that other filmmakers don’t because they flat-out refuse to give Clooney a serious role. Not that we’re even remotely complaining; his performance as Baird Whitlock, 1950s movie star and straight-up dunce, proved to be a worthy entry to the informal series of the Coen’s casting Clooney as — quoted by themselves — a “numbskull”.
Rather than consigning him to the background like in Burn After Reading, their 2016 period comedy Hail, Caesar! featured Clooney as an idiotic yet relatively innocent actor who is kidnapped by, and then willingly joins, a group of blacklisted Communist screenwriters. It was the last time we saw Clooney in a film (not directed by himself) until last year, and, whilst the actor has proved himself time and time again to be more than capable of helming a picture, it serves as a reminder of just how good his acting chops can be utilised when put in the hands of serious auteurs.
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009)
Wes Anderson’s sixth film, and first of two animated features so far, took his distinct brand of deadpan humour and singular aesthetic sensibilities to the world of stop-motion, proving that his filmmaking style was not confined to one medium.
Clooney continued his streak of playing leading figures, this time as the titular Mr. Fox, who galvanises his animal friends and family against the tyranny of three terrible farmers. It was the only time the actor worked with Anderson, but he fit the director’s deadpan, off-beat style like a glove, and definitively proved that his rich, velvet-like voice was just as iconic as his good looks. Whilst he won’t be appearing in Anderson’s upcoming Asteroid City, one can only hope that the two recognise their great work together and that Clooney and Anderson reunite again.
2. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (The Coen Brothers, 2000)
In this undisputed classic, the Coen Brothers transported Homer’s Odyssey into Depression-era 1930s Mississippi. Like many of the Coen’s cult classics, the film got a lukewarm reception on release but has since been re-assessed as one of the directing duo’s finest films, and the Grammy-winning album remains one of the greatest film soundtracks of all time.
Clooney’s portrayal of Ulysses McGill, the preening leader of a band of escaped convicts on the lam, proved the handsome actor had comedy chops to boot. A man of contradictions, Ulysses was assertive yet deeply insecure, driven yet full of self-doubt and practical whilst being absurdly vain and obsessed with a certain brand of hair product: “I’m a Dapper Dan man!” 23 years later, and it remains of Clooney’s most enjoyable performances.
1. The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011)
Alexander Payne’s fifth as writer/director, The Descendants, was a shamelessly sentimental family drama that succeeded on almost every level. With a stunning, varied soundtrack of Hawaiian folk scoring beautiful vistas of the island, the film followed Clooney as Matt King, a property lawyer who attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughters after his wife falls into a coma.
Nominated for a ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award, Clooney’s portrayal of a quietly grieving father was a wonderfully nuanced and fresh performance from the actor. Drastically understated in comparison to other roles, he gives us a character that is unsure of himself and his decisions, deftly navigating between yearning, rage and paternal love.
