When George Clooney went too method for his own good: “I was supposed to play a drunk”
Before George Clooney became a devilishly handsome, ultra-smooth A-list movie icon, he was a young, aspiring actor like anyone else trying to make their way in Hollywood. In his younger days, though, Clooney was a renegade who didn’t take anything too seriously, and this led to some decidedly odd choices when auditioning for roles.
It’s been well-documented that Clooney struggled for a decade in relative obscurity before he finally landed his breakout role as Dr Doug Ross in ER in 1994, and his laissez-faire approach to auditions may have contributed to this long wait. When he wasn’t playing insanely elaborate, time-consuming pranks on his roommate Richard Kind, Clooney would try out for roles of all shapes and sizes with the abandon of someone who didn’t seem to care if they got the job.
“I was a big props guy,” Clooney once told W magazine. “I took a dog to one audition and just held it under my arm, even though there was no dog in the scene. It was for Family Ties. I didn’t get the job, so clearly it didn’t work.” On another occasion, Clooney auditioned for a dialogue-free role in a war movie and had to pretend he was being shot at, stepping on a landmine, and jumping into a foxhole. He struggled to commit to the imaginary exercise fully, though, and chuckled, “I didn’t get the part.”
However, Clooney’s most egregious, “What was I thinking?” audition story came in the early ’90s when he somehow found himself up for a part in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by the great Francis Ford Coppola. It’s not exactly known which role Clooney was called to read for, but he remembered the character was a drunkard. So, he did the only thing that made sense within his nothing-to-lose mentality: he went to the audition legitimately soused.
“I was supposed to play a drunk guy, and I got really drunk to do it, because I thought that was the best way to do it,” Clooney remembered in 2016.
In perhaps the least surprising outcome of all time, Clooney’s bold attempt to secure a part in Coppola’s major motion picture while inebriated was not the success story he had imagined. In fact, he recalled that Coppola personally phoned his agent to yell, “He was drunk!” with barely restrained astonishment, and a mildly embarrassed Clooney was forced to admit, “That didn’t work out.”
In truth, Clooney’s series of disastrous early auditions might not have yielded the results he wanted, but his approach did eventually pay off. The star revealed that the impulse for too many young actors is to “go into an audition going, ‘Please like me, please.'” Casting agents can sniff out this desperation, which will likely make a performance come across as inauthentic. By resolutely refusing to take anything remotely seriously, Clooney was trying to negate this desperation.
“If you take the pressure off, it makes a difference in the way you audition,” he explained. “And by the way, it took me a long time to figure this out.”
After this domino fell, Clooney’s next step toward finally understanding the vagaries of auditioning was admitting to himself where he truly was in his career. Even after he started experiencing success on ER, he confessed to perceiving himself as “a film actor doing television,” yet he still couldn’t land film roles to save his life. It was only when he faced reality and admitted, “I was a TV actor,” that another layer of pressure was removed from his shoulders. After this, the movie roles paradoxically began rolling in.
