The one role George Clooney will always regret not playing: “Not that I’m holding a grudge”
Since overcoming the most difficult period of his career to finally establish himself as a viable leading man, George Clooney has rarely felt the need to pitch himself directly to a filmmaker for a role.
As strange as it might sound to a generation raised on streaming, there used to be a time when successful TV actors weren’t guaranteed to find success on the silver screen. These days, the biggest stars flit between both, but when Clooney wanted to make the leap in the mid-1990s, he almost ruined it.
Quite frankly, three Primetime Emmy nominations and a pair of Golden Globe nods for playing Doug Ross on the ratings sensation ER didn’t mean shit as far as studio bosses were concerned. However, Clooney thought he’d lucked out when he was hired to replace Val Kilmer as the ‘Caped Crusader’ in Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin, and everyone knows how that turned out.
Thankfully, salvation was right around the corner, with films like David O Russell’s Three Kings, Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, Michael Hoffman’s One Fine Day, Wolfgang Petersen’s The Perfect Storm, and the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? cementing his A-list credentials by the millennium.
Since then, Clooney has never wavered from his spot on the upper rungs of the industry ladder. Diversifying into filmmaking, he’s won two Academy Awards from eight nominations split across six different categories, and he’s powerful and popular enough to ensure that “no” is one of the words he’s least likely to hear.
However, when he caught wind of Alexander Payne’s screenplay for Sideways and approached the writer and director to signal his interest in playing the washed-up actor Jack Cole, which eventually got Thomas Haden Church on the Oscars shortlist for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, he was told he was too famous to play the character: “Not that I’m holding a grudge,” he remarked to The Scotsman.
A chance encounter several years later saw Payne reveal to Clooney that he’d finally started working on his follow-up feature, and this time, there was someone he could potentially play. “I said, ‘I’m doing it whether I read the script or not,”‘ he recalled with a caveat. “Although that didn’t work for Batman & Robin.”
He may have been rejected for Payne’s five-time Oscar-nominated trip through wine country that won him the prize for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ and had a transformative impact on the winery subset for better and worse, but The Descendants was a more than worthy consolation prize.
Once again, the dramedy nabbed Payne the ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ Oscar and saw Clooney in the running for ‘Best Actor’, while he won the corresponding Golden Globe for his turn as struggling father Matt King. He was too well-known for Sideways, but he eventually got to collaborate with Payne on an acclaimed awards season favourite.
