HE’S PUTTING HIS MOTORBIKING DAYS BEHIND HIM

• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Tara Brady
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

In The Midnight Sky, a new post-apocalyptic thriller, Clooney plays a lonely, Arctic-bound scientist attempting to intercept a space mission from returning to a now-ravaged Earth. It was quite a stretch for the actor who, these days, finds himself surrounded at home; his wife, Amal, gave birth to a daughter, Ella, and a son, Alexander, in June 2017.

"Listen," he says, laughing. "I've got three-year-old twins. There's not a moment of peace in my house. I'd kill for some loneliness right now; I'll give you my left leg for some loneliness. But I do believe that in general, mankind right now is experiencing real loneliness because of this pandemic."

He points at his Zoom screen. "We're talking in this way when we should be sitting together in a room. We're missing out on contact with people - shaking hands and hugging and kissing your loved ones. A lot of my friends are visiting their parents in nursing homes and seeing them through glass windows for the last nine months. That's a hard thing to do. They are lonely in a deep, profound way. And the only thing I can say is that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that we are going to get through this."

In common with many recent projects, the dystopia that characterises Clooney's latest venture has a strange new relevance against the general craziness of 2020.

"Well, we didn't want to say whether it was the climate or what exactly it was that destroyed the Earth because I think your imagination is a lot more powerful than anything you can show on film," he says.

"We've seen in our world - especially in 2020 but it's been going along for a while - the division. It's not just the United States, although we've had a great amount of it. You can see it all over the world. Jimmy Carter once said that peace, like war, must be waged. You have to fight for it. And if we're not out there fighting for peace then it's not inconceivable that 30 years from now what you see in the film is something we can do to ourselves."

The Midnight Sky is Clooney's seventh film as a director. He has directed a feature every three years since 2002's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

"Really?" says Clooney. "I didn't know it was every three years. When I was writing it took me six months to write Good Night, and Good Luck, then six to produce and six months to a year in post-production. So I guess it just happens naturally. And then you have to take an acting job in between to pay the rent. I don't get paid on the director gigs. Every...