George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino have both been major players in the film industry for decades now, and early on in their careers, they had the opportunity to work together in From Dusk till Dawn (a movie packed with amazing behind-the-scenes facts), which Tarantino wrote and appeared as the brother of Clooney’s character. The two men have remained in touch since then, and they’re still on friendly terms… mostly. Currently, Clooney and Tarantino have a bed going after the latter shaded the former’s career, and Clooney shared his thoughts on the matter.
Clooney is currently doing the promotional circuit with Brad Pitt for their new movie Wolfs, which will be streamable with an Apple TV+ subscription next month and is already getting a sequel. While the two were speaking with GQ, Clooney briefly addressed how Tarantino had apparently stated that he didn’t consider him to be a movie star, saying:
Quentin said some shit about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him. He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about you, and somebody else, and then this guy goes, ‘Well, what about George?’ He goes, he’s not a movie star. And then he literally said something like, ‘Name me a movie since the millennium.’ And I was like, ‘Since the millennium? That’s kind of my whole fucking career.’ So now I’m like, all right, dude, fuck off. I don’t mind giving him shit. He gave me shit.
It’s unclear where George Clooney saw these comments, as there’s no recent interview where Quentin Tarantino was speaking about Clooney in this way… or at all. However, even assuming that Tarantino deemed that Clooney isn’t a movie star, that simply isn’t true. Like the actor said, he’s been in a lot of big movies since the 2000s started, including the original Ocean’s trilogy (which also starred Brad Pitt), Good Night, and Good Luck, Michael Clayton, Burn After Reading and Up in the Air, to name just a few. Side note, he also gets bonus points for weathering the mess that was 1997’s Batman & Robin.
Now, George Clooney did take a four-year act from acting, and he has acknowledged that he got tired of this art form after a while. Still, even in more recent years, he’s starred in The Midnight Sky and Ticket to Paradise, cameoed as Bruce Wayne in The Flash, and voiced Spaceman in IF, as well as has an untitled Noah Baumbach film coming up. I won’t go so far as to say that Clooney is necessarily at the same kind of level he was more than a decade ago, but the man has definitely qualified for movie star status several times over.
George Clooney doesn’t sound like he’s taking what Quentin Tarantino too hard, but I imagine this doesn’t bode well for the actor agreeing to star in the director’s final movie. Admittedly, what that feature will be remains a mystery since The Movie Critic has been scrapped. Brad Pitt, on the other hand, has previously been directed by Tarantino in Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and had The Movie Critic moved forward, he would have appeared, potentially as the lead.
You can see George Clooney return to a cinematic setting when Wolfs begins its limited theatrical release on September 20, followed by its Apple TV+ drop a week later. There’s no word yet on when his movie with Noah Baumbach will be released, but when it does, you’ll need a Netflix subscription to watch it.