George Clooney opened up about his marriage to human rights lawyer Amal Clooney in a rare interview Sunday, admitting she “changed everything” for him. The actor, whose new film The Midnight Sky hits Netflix on Dec. 23, met Amal in 2013 and married the following year. The couple is parents to 3-year-old twins, Alexander and Ella, whom Clooney jokingly called “knuckleheads.”
“There is no question that having Amal in my life changed everything for me, no question about that,” Clooney, 59, told CBS Sunday Morning in an interview that aired this weekend. “It was the first time that everything that she did and everything about her was infinitely more important than anything about me.” Clooney called becoming a father “fulfilling” and something he “didn’t see coming.” They never even talked about marriage when they were dating.
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“I asked her outta the blue,” the two-time Oscar-winner said. “Took her a long time to say yes. I was on my knee for like 20 minutes. I finally said, ‘Look, I’m gonna throw my hip out.’ We told that story to her parents, and they’re like, ‘There’s something wrong with his hip?’” Clooney said the couple also did not talk about having kids, so having twins was an even bigger surprise. “It’s unbelievable,” Clooney said of becoming a dad.
“We never talked about having kids,” Clooney explained. “And then one day we just said, ‘What do you think?’ And, you know, then we go to the doctor and, you know, you do the ultrasound and like, ‘Hey, you got a baby boy.’ I said, ‘Baby boy, fantastic!’ Then they go, ‘And you got another one there.’ And I was like … I was up for one, you know? ‘Cause, again, I’m old. All of a sudden it’s, like, two? And I literally – you know, it’s hard to get me to not talk. And I just stood there for like 10 minutes, just staring at this piece of paper going … two … silently. But I’m so glad they have each other, you know?”
During the coronavirus pandemic, Clooney has been spending more time at home than he would like. He also admitted to cutting his hair by himself for the past 25 years. “Look, my hair’s, like really like straw, you know? And it’s so easy to cut. You can’t really make too many mistakes,” Clooney said, revealing that he got the Flowbee. “It comes with a vacuum cleaner and the clippers? Yeah. I still have it… Listen, man, it works,” Clooney told CBS’s, Tracy Smith. “Now, I wouldn’t do it to my wife…”
Clooney’s latest project, The Midnight Sky, is his first movie since 2016’s Money Monster, although he did appear in Hulu’s 2019 limited series adaptation of Catch-22. He also directed the new movie, which is a science fiction drama based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel Good Morning, Midnight. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world where Clooney plays a lonely scientist in the Arctic who tries to stop Sully (Felicity Jones) and other astronauts from coming back to earth. It was filmed last year, before the coronavirus pandemic. The cast also includes David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Demian Bichir and Kyle Chandler.
