The A-list star George Clooney cut out of a Coen brothers movie: “I had to write him this awful note”
In the late ’90s, George Clooney received a phone call from one of the most iconic directors ever. Alarmingly, the call was to tell him his role had been almost completely cut from the director’s new war epic, The Thin Red Line. At that point, Clooney was already an established star, but he would never forget the feeling he had finding out he was surplus to Terrence Malick’s requirements. Nearly two decades later, though, Clooney made the very same call to a fellow A-lister to break the news that he’d been cut from a movie written by their mutual pals, the Coen brothers.
In truth, Malick’s three-hour World War II movie has gone down in Hollywood lore for the sheer volume of movie stars and character actors whose roles were chopped down to size. Everyone who was anyone at the time wanted to be in the movie because of Malick’s legendary status, with some stars offering to work for free. In the end, though, Malick had such a wealth of characters and plots that he cut Mickey Rourke and Bill Pullman completely out of the film, reduced Adrien Brody’s supposedly lead role to two lines, and left only one Clooney scene intact.
“I did a bunch of scenes in Thin Red Line and then got a call from Terry saying, ‘We’re cutting out everything except the very last scene,'” Clooney told Entertainment Weekly. To Malick’s surprise, though, the Out of Sight star felt having one remaining scene in the movie was somehow worse than being totally jettisoned, so he begged him, “Please cut me completely out of the movie! Don’t leave me in one scene!” Naturally, these pleas fell on deaf ears.
Fast-forward to 2017, though, and Clooney found himself in the same awkward position Malick had endured two decades prior. He had just made his sixth feature film as director: Suburbicon, a strange and sinister flick about a man in 1959 who deals with a home invasion at the same time a Black family moves into his all-white neighbourhood for the first time. The movie came together when a script Clooney and Grant Heslov wrote about a real Black family named the Myers who faced racism and harassment in 1950s Pennsylvania was combined with a crime movie the Coen brothers penned in 1986.
Indeed, the cast assembled for Suburbicon was effectively a Coen brothers jamboree, with Coen alums like Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, and Richard Kind supporting Clooney. However, another Coen favourite was also in the movie – Josh Brolin – until he found out he’d been unceremoniously left on the cutting room floor.
“We shot a couple of scenes with Josh playing a baseball coach that are really really funny,” Clooney explained. “But after we did our first screening, the one thing that became really clear to me was that [they] let the air out of the balloon, in terms of the tension in the film.”
A horrified Clooney realised that the movie he wanted to make wasn’t a black comedy, but something with an altogether darker tone. Unfortunately, this meant Brolin’s scenes, hilarious though they were, now stuck out like a sore thumb. “I had to write him this awful note where I just said, ‘You’re not going to believe it, but these scenes really don’t work any more,'” Clooney admitted.
Naturally, Brolin was concerned that he’d somehow done something wrong or not delivered the goods, so Clooney said, “I’m sending you the scenes, so you can see, they’re actually the two funniest scenes in the movie.'” He shook his head, and added, “I remember sitting there with the editor going, ‘Fuck! I can’t believe this!'”
Ultimately, Clooney had to do what was best for his film – just like Malick did – and that involved letting down a guy he’d literally worked with a year before on the Coens’ Hail, Caesar! Still, he didn’t want there to be any doubt in people’s minds that there was any acrimony between the two stars, or that he hadn’t been happy with Brolin’s work.
“He was so great in the film,” Clooney lamented. “I never like talking about those kind of things because it can be really unfair to an actor, except to say he was just absolutely great in the movie.”
