“It’s come back to haunt me”: the only movie George Clooney hates more than ‘Batman & Robin’
Most people would assume, and with good reason, that George Clooney will always view Batman & Robin as his career’s ultimate nadir. However, as Yoda would say, there is another.
Squeezing himself into the superhero’s rubber costume, complete with wholly unnecessary nipples, left a black mark against the actor’s filmography that he’s never been able to reconcile. It’s an awful, awful movie, one so bad it’s not even good in a perversely entertaining way, but it’s not his biggest regret.
Showing himself to be a good sport, Clooney did make the most unlikely of returns when he played Bruce Wayne in the final scene of The Flash, but since the comic book adaptation flopped at the box office and lost a fortune, it accidentally turned out to be a fitting farewell to the worst big-screen Batman of all time.
It was supposed to be the making of him, too; having smouldered in ER and shown movie star potential in From Dusk Till Dawn, playing one of pop culture’s most iconic characters in his big-budget debut as a leading man was supposed to cement him as a Hollywood mainstay. Instead, it damn near killed him.
He recovered quickly, though, with his crackling chemistry opposite Jennifer Lopez in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight becoming his coming-out party as a certified silver screen star, and he was still only five years removed from the performance he wished had been swept under the rug and forgotten forever.
Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s aforementioned genre-bending cult classic was Clooney’s first feature-length appearance in three years, with his ER commitments keeping him consigned to television. He would have preferred it if 1992’s Unbecoming Age was the last, even though nobody remembers it, but instead, that honour fell to writer and director David Marconi’s The Harvest.
A bog-standard thriller about a screenwriter who travels to Mexico for inspiration, only to wake up five days later and discover that he’s missing a kidney, doesn’t sound worse than Batman & Robin, or not by much. And yet, because he was only there for a laugh to visit his cousin, Miguel Ferrer, who played the leading role, he was indignant that his cameo appearance ended up being listed in the credits as ‘Lip-Syncing Transvestite’.
“It wasn’t really supposed to be credited, and suddenly, this idiot director put our names on it,” he raged to Esquire. “It was like, ‘Thanks, pal’. It didn’t matter when nobody knew who you were, but now it’s come back to haunt me.” Under normal circumstances, The Harvest would have been lost to the sands of cinematic time long ago.
Unfortunately for Clooney, since he became a household name, an A-lister, and a two-time Academy Award winner, he’s also the guy who was credited in a movie as ‘Lip-Syncing Transvestite’, a role that should have been a lot easier to try and erase from the history books than his infamous stint as Batman.
