NEW YORK (AP) — George Clooney made waves in July when he called on Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race, citing diminished capacity. For Clooney, there wasn’t a choice to stay silent.
“I was raised to tell the truth and telling the truth means telling it when it’s not comfortable,” the actor-director and big Democratic booster tells The Associated Press. “I did what I was raised and taught to do. That’s it.”
There was inevitable backlash — just as there was back when he was branded a traitor for speaking out against the invasion of Iraq — but Clooney took the hits.
“Telling the truth to power or taking chances like that —we’ve seen it over our history,” he says. “We’ve been here and survived these things and we will survive it.”
Clooney’s truth-to-power stance takes another step this spring as he makes his Broadway debut, telling the story of legendary reporter Edward R. Murrow in an adaptation of his 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Performances starts March 12.
Murrow, who died in 1965, is considered one of the architects of U.S. broadcast news and perhaps his greatest moment was opposing Sen. Joe McCarthy, who cynically created paranoia of a communist threat in the 1950s.
“This is a story about who we are at our best, when we hold our own feet to the fire, when we check and balance ourselves,” says Clooney. “What’s scary about now and the difference between Murrow’s time is that we’ve now decided that truth is negotiable.”
Movie versus play
In the movie version — which Clooney co-wrote with Grant Heslov — the role of Murrow went to David Strathairn and Clooney played CBS executive Fred Friendly; this time, Clooney takes up the mantle of Murrow. When he and Heslov did a reading for theater investors he just played Murrow and the financiers agreed to sink their money in the play — on the condition Clooney stay in the role.
As in the movie, the play version will have footage of the real McCarthy on screens and the stage will resemble a newsroom with several dozen old-fashioned monitors mixing old and new footage.
The transition to Broadway makes a lot of sense since many of the movie’s reviewers said it felt to them a lot like a play. It actually was originally conceived as a live TV movie, an idea scuttled after Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s nipple in the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show and scared away any notion of live network events.
“It is an incredibly literary play,” says Tony-winning director David Cromer. “It is filled with debate. It is filled with well-reasoned and very complex arguments about is this the right thing to do? Is this the right thing to do now? What happens when we do this? How do we say this?”
Journalism under fire
Two-time Oscar winner Clooney returns to Murrow at a time when journalists are under fire from the new U.S. administration and being denied access for not following White House talking points.
“We didn’t decide to remount or do the play for any real political reasons,” says Heslov, a frequent Clooney collaborator who is also making his Broadway writing debut. “It turns out that the environment might be ripe for it.”
Murrow had a large presence in Clooney’s home growing up. His father, Nick Clooney, a veteran journalist, worked as a TV news anchor and host in a variety of cities including Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. He also wrote a newspaper column in Cincinnati and taught journalism at American University.
“I’m the son of a journalist, a proper journalist, a guy who tells the truth. My father’s still out there fighting the good fight,” says Clooney. “I believe in it. I believe in the whole idea of how this works.”
Broadway starpower
Clooney is part of a starry group of Hollywood veterans arriving on Broadway this season, a list that includes Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Jim Parsons, Sarah Snook and John Mulaney.
Clooney insisted before he came that he didn’t want to be the highest paid actor on Broadway. It mirrored the time he mortgaged his house and paid himself a salary of just $1 to finance the movie version of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”
“To me, it’s like, pay Patti LuPone the most of anybody on Broadway. Pay somebody who’s paid their dues. It shouldn’t be somebody who’s doing his first Broadway play,” he says. “I can’t do that. I don’t want to be part of that. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
The box office for a ticket to see him at the Winter Garden is white hot even before previews begin but Clooney deflects that to Murrow — it’s not me, he suggests, it’s the character he’s playing.
“The words of Edward Murrow are words that kind of soothe us,” he says. “It’s a salve for insanity. And I think people are excited to be in a room and share some of those conversations.”
‘I know how to tell this story’
Clooney hasn’t done a full-length play since he got his Equity Card in 1986 in Chicago as the comic relief in “Vicious,” about punk icon Sid Vicious. “Most of the cast members that I’m working with weren’t born when I did my last play. So it’s scary,” he says.
He thought he’d missed his chance at Broadway, a notch on many actor’s bucket list. He’s 63 now and it would mean uprooting his family for months.
“I’ve succeeded in my career. I’m not saying that I haven’t succeeded, but I hadn’t done anything on Broadway and I thought maybe it’s too late,” he says.
“I’d been offered a couple of plays that I didn’t think I was right for, and I thought if I was going to do it, I should do something that I was right for. And this was an opportunity where I thought, ‘Well, I know how to tell this story. I may not do a great job with it. You know, I may really screw it up, but I know what’s required of the thing.’”
