It reads like a Hollywood script. George Clooney, the actor once famous for being the hot TV doctor who owned a pot-bellied pig, is now kingmaker in the land of no kings. Just as America settled into its summer holidays, apparently resigned to a choice of Joe Biden or Donald Trump in November, Clooney has lobbed a grenade onto the pages of The New York Times.
Describing himself as a lifelong Democrat who loves Biden, he writes that Biden is nevertheless unfit to run again for the presidency, and needs urgently to step aside if the party has any chance of beating Trump. “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big f***ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” he writes. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate. We are not going to win in November with this president. The dam has broken. We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”
Democratic leaders, he continues, “need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign. This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and Congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private.”
In the years since ER Clooney has become a power player in US politics, a man with the sort of credibility and personal approval ratings politicians can only dream of. If you think he’s just a film star with a glamorous wife, you really haven’t been paying attention.
• George Clooney: Joe Biden has to step down. He’s not the same man
Advertisement
Clooney has wanted to be taken seriously for years, and now he is. But the turning point wasn’t when he made serious films about serious issues (although he did), it was when he married a brilliant and beautiful British human rights lawyer called Amal. Since their wedding ten years ago, she has held Isis to account and advised the International Criminal Court. She’s acquired a veneer of Hollywood glamour; he’s acquired a veneer of intellectual heft. Together they’ve become the ultimate power couple. Now Clooney’s intervention could change the face of the American election, the fate of American democracy, and, with it, the rest of the world. Not bad for the hot doctor from ER.
Clooney left that show in 1999 with the hope of making it big on the big screen. By 2005, he was making worthy films about US foreign policy in the Middle East, oil company corruption, and McCarthyism in Good Night, and Good Luck. Fans used to seeing him smouldering in ER instead had to see him playing an overweight, unattractive CIA agent in Syriana.
As the focus became less about his looks — or so he hoped, perhaps — he began to stake out his position as a liberal political activist. He joined Bono in lobbying the World Bank to send aid to Africa, but while some actors hectored and the world rolled its eyes, Clooney delivered his message with good humour. The trademark twinkle was never far away.
But when it came to being taken seriously, his love life always preceded him. The first, brief marriage was in Las Vegas, to his fellow actress Talia Balsam. There was a succession of glamorous girlfriends, including the British TV presenter Lisa Snowdon and the Italian TV presenter Elisabetta Canalis. On the big screen he oozed sexual chemistry with Jennifer Lopez and Julia Roberts, recruited his famous friends Brad Pitt and Andy Garcia to star alongside him in Ocean’s Eleven, and famously had a $10,000 bet with Nicole Kidman, whom he met on the set of One Fine Day, that he wouldn’t get married or have children before the age of 40.
Clooney won the bet, but Kidman had the last laugh. He was 52 and possibly the most famous bachelor in the world in the summer of 2013 when a friend brought a human rights lawyer called Amal Alamuddin to dinner at his house beside Lake Como.
Advertisement
“A mutual friend of ours said, ‘I’m stopping by and can I bring my friend?’” George said later. “I was like, ‘Of course!’” His agent had met her before and told Clooney he would marry the brilliant and beautiful specialist in international law and human rights. From London’s Doughty Street Chambers, she advised governments and appeared regularly at the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. She was unlikely to have her head swayed by a Hollywood heart-throb.
“We stayed up all night talking,” Clooney said later, “and I got her email address, so we started writing. I didn’t know if she wanted to go out with me. I just thought we were buddies.”
That October they were seen having dinner in London on what he later admitted was their first proper date. “Pretty quickly,” he said, “things escalated.” One of Amal’s colleagues later said that he always knew when she was reading a text or email from Clooney because she had a particular smile on her face.
Clooney proposed with a seven-carat diamond at his home in Los Angeles, and later said she was so shocked that it took her 20 minutes to say yes. They married almost exactly ten years ago, in September 2014 in Venice, in a flurry of ceremonies, parties, couture dresses and famous friends. “It sort of changed everything in terms of what I thought my future — my personal future — was going to be,” Clooney admitted.
He and Amal launched his tequila brand, Casamigos, and the pictures made the front pages. But they also discussed refugee policy with the German chancellor Angela Merkel, and that made the front pages too. In May 2016 they stole the show on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, but three months later they were at the United Nations for a leaders’ summit for refugees. In the summer holidays, he was photographed leading out his glamorous wife, in high heels and four-figure dresses, for dinner near their house on Lake Como. In term time they established the Clooney Foundation for Justice, providing free legal support to victims of human rights abuses. It seeks “to create a world where human rights are protected and no one is above the law”.
Advertisement
Michelle Obama gave a speech at the foundation’s inaugural Albie awards, named after an anti-apartheid judge, in which she spoke of Justice Albie Sachs’s role in transforming his own country, South Africa, and their ability to do the same to their own, the US. “We honour not just a single man’s legacy of progress, but the possibility of progress that’s yet to be written, possibility that lies inside all of us,” she said. That made the front pages, too, as did Clooney’s call to the White House last month, to berate the president, not to bury him.
Amal played a key role in the decision by the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for war crimes for both the Israeli prime minister and Hamas leaders. When Biden condemned the move, Clooney called to complain, and that made the front pages too.
In his article Clooney writes that the Democrats have “a very exciting bench”. He names the “strong Democrats” he would like to see stand, and the need to “focus on what will make this country soar”. “Then,” he concludes, “we could go into the Democratic convention next month and figure it out.”
The Democratic National Convention next month will be held in Chicago, where ER was set. In America, Hollywood actors don’t generally torpedo the presidency, they stand for it. Could Clooney be the saviour the Democrat needs? Could the couple with the most formidable pulling power end up in the ultimate seat of power, the White House? Well, it would probably make the front page.
