The Oscar-nominated role George Clooney wasn’t good enough to play: “I don’t have the gravitas”
In 2005, George Clooney assembled a murderer’s row of acting talent for his second movie as a director. The cast featured heavy hitters like Robert Downey Jr, Jeff Daniels, Patricia Clarkson, and Frank Langella, with the lead role played by veteran character actor David Strathairn. It landed the Nomadland star his sole Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’—a moment that must have been slightly bittersweet for Clooney.
After all, he initially intended to play the part himself but got cold feet about whether he had the chops to pull it off. Thankfully, though, the story of Clooney’s lack of belief in himself as a dramatic actor did have a happy ending—it just took 20 years to come to pass.
When Clooney was growing up, journalism was vitally important to his family. His father, Nick, was a newsman who worked as a TV news anchor in cities like Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City. He also taught journalism at American University and wrote an acclaimed newspaper column, so the importance of journalism as an art form capable of speaking truth to the masses was always close to Clooney’s heart.
“I’m the son of a journalist, a proper journalist, a guy who tells the truth,” Clooney told The Independent in 2025. “My father’s still out there fighting the good fight. I believe in it. I believe in the whole idea of how this works.”
There was one totemic figure who loomed larger than any others in the journalism world to Clooney and his dad, though: Edward R Murrow, a man considered one of the foundational cornerstones of American broadcast journalism. Murrow broadcast live from London during the Blitz in World War II and then became a TV figure tasked with interviewing important people like President John F Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt. However, he became most well-known for pushing back against Wisconsin’s crusading Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the ’50s.
McCarthy developed a reputation as someone who could ruin lives and careers by indiscriminately accusing people of being Communists, and Murrow used his platform to say how wrong that was. He famously declared, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.”
When it came time to dramatise Murrow and McCarthy’s conflict, Clooney enlisted his longtime collaborator Grant Heslov to pen a screenplay with him. Clooney was so passionate about the material that, when no studio would insure him to work on the movie thanks to an injury he suffered on the set of Syriana, he mortgaged one of his houses to help finance the picture. Good Night, and Good Luck – named after Murrow’s famous sign-off – became a true labour of love for Clooney.
Up until the initial table read of the movie, Clooney was pencilled in to play his hero, Murrow. However, after it, he became convinced that he wasn’t the right man for the role, admitting to Heslov, “I don’t have the gravitas.” Not one to sugarcoat things for his famous friend, Heslov agreed, noting that Murrow had “the weight of the world on his shoulders” and, at that point in his career, Clooney wasn’t weathered enough to project such import. Luckily, Strathairn stepped into the role and knocked it out of the park, securing one of the film’s six Oscar nominations.
Fast-forward 20 years, though, and Clooney got another opportunity to portray Murrow when he and Heslov signed a deal to bring Good Night, and Good Luck to Broadway. This time, the 63-year-old star felt ready to tackle that world-weariness Murrow exuded. He told The New York Times, “I always felt like there was a sadness to Murrow, and that was not something that you could associate with me at 40 years old.”
Amazingly, the play was Clooney’s first time acting on stage since he played the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 1986. However, he confessed to feeling nervous about working without the safety net of multiple takes on a project about a man who had such a profound impact on his life.
“I’m terrified of it,” he confessed. “Are you kidding? I’m doing 11 monologues. When you get older, your recall isn’t the same. When I was doing ER, it was 12 pages of medical dialogue. You look at it in the morning and you say, ‘OK, let’s go!’ Now you get older and you’re going, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Well, don’t drink any wine tonight!”
