When George Clooney paid for a satellite to spy on a dictator: “Welcome to my life, Mr War Criminal”
You can’t ever really know what stars are actually like unless you know them personally. They might be decent people, they might not be, but really, we can only go from what they do in their public-facing lives, and in terms of George Clooney, it’s half hawking coffee and half political activism.
He does, of course, act in films and direct them too, but when you hear him speak, it’ll usually be about Sudan, or about American republicans, or quite admirably drawing attention to mass disasters like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
And unlike most stars who will happily join up with brands to make as much cash as possible without wondering about what those corporations might be up to day to day, Clooney does at least consider it, and more than that, he’ll dig deeper, as he’s shown with a long-term partnership with Nespresso.
He’s been in cahoots with the coffee giants for about 15 years now, lending his handsome silver fox face to help them shift billions of those colourful little pods of caffeine around the world, but he does it, so he says, so that the farmers who produce the ingredients in places like Costa Rica and Sudan can make more money than they would otherwise for their families.
Clooney is especially interested in the latter country, having actively campaigned since 2005 to attract attention to the atrocities, war profiteering and corruption going on in the African nation, going as far as founding an initiative that uses satellites to track military activities and that conducts undercover operations to expose how South Sudanese leaders use the cover of the civil war to syphon off oil riches.
Back in 2013, Clooney said: “Most of the money I make on the [Nespresso] commercials I spend keeping a satellite over the border of North and South Sudan to keep an eye on Omar al-Bashir [the Sudanese dictator charged with war crimes at The Hague].”
Adding: “Then he puts out a statement saying that I’m spying on him and how would I like it if a camera was following me everywhere I went and I go ‘well welcome to my life Mr War Criminal’. I want the war criminal to have the same amount of attention that I get. I think that’s fair.”
And Clooney certainly gets plenty of attention for what continues to be a personal passion project, which once resulted in his being arrested for civil disobedience at the Sudanese embassy in Washington DC.
It isn’t just Sudan that has seen Clooney throw his fame and money at a cause, however. In 2018, he donated $500,000 to the ‘March for our Lives’ campaign, which sought to effect change in the gun control laws in the US after yet another high school shooting.
Most recently, in 2020, he donated around $100,000 to charities in Lebanon after Beirut was left devastated by an explosion that killed 145 people and left some 5,000 injured.
In terms of his day job, Clooney continues to put together the long-awaited Ocean’s 14, in which he’ll reprise his role of Danny Ocean in the hit heist franchise alongside the likes of Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. Filming is expected to start later this year with a release date toward the end of 2027.
