George Clooney Reveals Why He Had To Call Julia Roberts Before Agreeing To Next Movie
George Clooney had to give her a call!
This article is more than 2 years old
Actor-director George Clooney recently revealed that prior to accepting a film role, he had to check in with Julia Roberts. Per MovieWeb, the once and hopefully not future Batman explained that upon reading the script for the upcoming romantic comedy film Ticket to Paradise, his immediate concern was whether Roberts was also on board. Given that her response was pretty much “I’ll do it if you do it,” the two stars were locked in quickly. While Clooney and Roberts have appeared together in a number of films, this will be the first rom-com the two will star in together.
Of course, George Clooney is no stranger to romantic comedy. After breaking out as one of the stars of seminal TV medical drama ER in the 1990s, he moved into film. He co-starred with Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis and Quentin Tarantino in the Robert Rodriguez-directed cult horror film From Dusk till Dawn, and then with Jennifer Lopez in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight.
Clooney’s romantic films would come to include One Fine Day with Michelle Pfeiffer and Intolerable Cruelty with Catherine Zeta-Jones. But he achieved some of his most popular work with Julia Roberts, leading an ensemble cast in Ocean’s Eleven through Thirteen. As charming career criminal Danny Ocean, the movies eventually saw him reconciling with his former spouse Tess (Roberts) and robbing many rich people.
Ticket to Paradise is set to be directed by filmmaker Ol Parker, who also co-wrote the film. Given that Parker is most notable for writing and directing the ABBA jukebox musical sequel Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, it will be interesting to see if this new movie has any of the surreal musical flair of that. In an interview with Deadline, George Clooney seemed quite taken specifically with the dialogue. He said:
I’ve done some sort of snarky ones, you know, and in this one Julia and I just get to be mean to each other in the funniest way,
In recent years, both George Clooney and Julia Roberts have made atypical career moves for stars of the stature. While it would have once been impossible to think of some of the biggest box office draws in the world doing anything but the most popular films, it is to their credit that they have been exploring different fields. Roberts starred in the first season of Amazon Prime series Homecoming, one of the first TV shows to be adapted from a podcast series. She must have liked the experience, since she will also be starring in the Watergate scandal series Gaslit, itself adapted from the Slate podcast Slow Burn.
For his part, George Clooney has increasingly moved to directing and producing films. Although he has publicly spoken about the rising difficulty of getting theaters to show dramas (as opposed to superhero and action films), he does not seem to be slowing down from them. He is set to star in an untitled action thriller with fellow Ocean’s alumnus Brad Pitt and recently directed and starred in the dystopian science fiction film The Midnight Sky for Netflix. After a Covid-19 related production delay, Ticket to Paradise is set to be released by Universal Pictures in the fall of 2022.
