The movies George Clooney called his “trilogy of cowardly idiots”
He might be handsome, charming, and incredibly suave, but George Clooney also has a mischievous side that’s found him ready, willing, and able to either subvert or mercilessly poke fun at his own image.
The star has never been one to take himself too seriously despite all the success he’s experienced in Hollywood, with Batman & Robin doing a sterling job of keeping him grounded, to the point it’s been almost three decades since the movie released and he still can’t stop himself from tearing it down.
It may have been single-minded determination and commitment to several different aspects of filmmaking that helped raise Clooney to A-list status before he diversified his portfolio through writing, directing, and producing, but he’s never lost that self-deprecating streak or a desire to have some fun while he’s working.
The latter has made him one of the industry’s most notorious jokesters, too, with Brad Pitt having been on the receiving end of several pranks dating back over 20 years, but Clooney the square-jawed and all-American on-screen matinee idol has always been counterbalanced with a comedian who has no issues whatsoever playing the fool.
In a way that made him a perfect foil for Joel and Ethan Coen, who allowed him to stretch himself as the leader of an ill-equipped trio of treasure-hunting escaped convicts in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, before he reunited with the sibling auteurs to play a smarmy divorce lawyer who meets their match in Intolerable Cruelty.
On both occasions there was plenty of time dedicated to flashing his innate megawatt star power, but also an equal amount of screentime dedicated towards the sheer ineptitude of Ulysses Everett McGill and Miles Massey respectively. It quickly became a recurring theme of his Coen collaborations, and Clooney knew what was coming long before he completed his hattrick.
“Joel and Ethan have another film they want me to do, Hail, Caesar!, where I play an absolute jackass,” he told the BBC around the time of Intolerable Cruelty‘s release. “They’re talking about it being my trilogy of cowardly idiots. Which seems perfect for me. I’m really lucky that I get to work with guys like those; they’re so much fun to work with.”
He wouldn’t have known it at the time, but it would be almost 15 years before Hail, Caesar! came to fruition, and he even made another Coen brothers movie in between. However, in Burn After Reading, cowardly idiot duties largely fell on Brad Pitt and his ludicrous Chad Feldheimer, even if Clooney’s paranoid womaniser Harry Pfarrer did fit the bill on several counts.
Baird Whitlock definitely ticks the required boxes without reproach, however, with the dim-witted movie star being drugged, kidnapped, and easily converted into a communist sympathiser in Hail, Caesar! It took him longer than he could have anticipated, but Clooney’s cowardly idiot trilogy came full circle eventually.
