Being the butt of a joke should be nothing new for Sarah Palin—except this time, it’s not for her politics.

Following news that S.P. had a bad case of the gimmes at the Silver Spoon Oscar Suite in Hollywood earlier this week, known jokester George Clooney savored the opportunity to take a shot at the questionably witted soccer mom. At the Publicists Guild Awards luncheon in L.A. this afternoon, George schlepped about 10 overflowing gift bags onstage while presenting his longtime flack Stan Rosenfeld with the Les Mason Award. Once at the mic, Clooney kindly apologized for his baggage, claiming he’d run into the former Alaskan governor in the gifting lounge.

Sarah may need a drink after that jab.

Read more: The Awful Truth

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29 George Clooney (CAA)

• Estimated 2009 earnings: $22 million
  • $10 million: Up in the Air (fee for starring)
  • $5 million: Fees for appearing in foreign commercials, royalties from older films, other revenue
  • $4.5 million: The Men Who Stare at Goats (back end, based on worldwide gross of $44 million; Clooney took no up-front fee, but got a now-rare first-dollar gross deal)
  • $2.5 million: The American (fee for starring in and producing upcoming spy thriller)

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Casual and full of humor, George Clooney, the most popular actor of the moment could be nominated for Oscars.

Beverly Hills, in a lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, George Clooney arrives in the rain to our rendezvous a few minutes before the ceremony the Golden Globe Awards.  Smoking rigor, who was nominated this year among the best performers, thanks to his performance in In the Air, has not failed to bring with him his beautiful Italian Elisabetta Canalis.  “Frankly, it is not beautiful?” He said, stroking with a gesture of complicity in the nose of his girlfriend.  Since he fell under the spell of this lovely brunette, Mr. Clooney is smiling again. Exclusive, he confides in France-Soir.

FRANCE-SOIR.  In your new film, In the Air, you play the role of a man who spends his time in airplanes and hotel rooms. The fiction joined this time for you, just the reality, right?

GEORGE CLOONEY. Yes, I must admit that that I embody the character in In the air touched me personally because there are undoubtedly some similarities between this role and my privacy.  What touched me in this film, it does embody a man who, through selfishness, has totally lost touch with reality. Finally, his taste for independence will play tricks on him and he will start to open their eyes to the real world.

Your character is completely disconnected from his family.  Are you close to yours?
It’s very strange because the more I’m getting older, the closer I get to my parents and my family in general. I feel more and more need to be at their sides. My father has become my best friend and chief confidant.

From simple B-series player, you have changed the status of Hollywood legend.  Today, in show business, everybody listens to you.  How do you explain this phenomenon?

It’s simple. Everything changed the day I bought the villa in Lake Como.Since I have this house in Italy, coincidentally, all the Hollywood stars want to be friends with me.  Brad Pitt refused to speak to me and now bows when I approached him! Matt Damon is almost ready to sell her body just to set foot in my house. I really have no merit. They are friends with me just by pure interest.

Speaking of Italy, you seem really happy today with your Italian girlfriend, Elisabetta Canalis …

Yes, right now, it’s la dolce vita. I see only by Italy and I can now travel on Air Italia (laughter).  I am extremely happy and I just try to enjoy the moment.

There is talk of a possible marriage.  Is this the case?

Why, when I’m with someone, people want to join immediately on two things: a wedding and a baby. For now, Elisabetta and I take great pleasure in being together. This is an extremely intelligent person who has the most down to earth.

What is the secret to his successful Hollywood life as a couple?

I think it is very difficult for an actor to get his love life, not because of external temptations but because of time requested for himself. To succeed in Hollywood, he must above all be damned selfish. Now that I have reached a certain level in my career, I want to take care of others. It is time that I quit to concentrate on my own little person, but to invest myself to others.

Under your jovial, they say you are an incredible anguish.

Absolutely.  That’s probably why I have to follow a lifelong treatment to cure my stomach ulcers. Besides, it reminds me that I must take my medicine. Bye.

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“I come from a family that prided itself on accomplishing things and that kind of feeling resonates inside me. I have a very good life, but it wouldn’t mean anything to me unless I felt that I was able to do some serious work and makes some sort of contribution.”  He added: “I hate wasting time, so I need to keep pushing myself.”

But George, who has a villa in Lake Como, Italy, loves his downtime.  “It takes you out of the spotlight for several months at a time,” he said. “My life over there takes me away from the circus aspects of being a celebrity and that’s a pleasant change for me. It’s much easier for me to hang out with friends in Laglio or a lot of the other small villages without 50 photographers showing up in half an hour.”

But he joked: “Whenever I want, I can always stage a diversion and invite Brad, Angie and their 15 children to come and visit,” he quipped.

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The director and star of ‘Up in the Air’ discovered kindred spirits as they put together their critically acclaimed film.

By John Horn

January 13, 2010

What were your first conversations about how to play Bingham?

Jason Reitman: Our first conversation wasn’t about what the script meant — there was an understanding of what we were making the movie about. Our first conversation was really, “When do you want to start? When do you want to stop? How many takes do you like doing?” It was just kind of a quick understanding of how do you actually like to make movies — the process.

Not about the film’s tone?

George Clooney: When you start out as an actor, you read a script thinking of it at its best. But that’s not usually the case in general, and usually what you have to do is you have to read a script and think of it at its worst. You read it going, “OK, how bad could this be?” first and foremost. You cannot make a good film out of a bad script. You can make a bad film out of a good script, but you can’t make a good film out of a bad script. But I read this script and said, “Well, honestly, it’s so well-written, it’s hard to screw it up.”

Is it a liability that in some ways Ryan Bingham represents your public personality as an actor?

Clooney: A lot of the things that are assigned to me in terms of my personal life are dealt with in the film. We had that conversation in Italy. I set the script down and I said, “I know what this would mean, in terms of what people will take away.” Specifically, not just liking the movie, but they’re going to go, “Oh, he’s playing himself.” Which actually isn’t true. But if the film was bad, it would have been a big problem. That’s where all the focus would have been.

I don’t run away from things I’ve done and said over the years. You can’t kind of adjust the story line to make it feel better for you personally. You have to say, “OK, let’s go at it head on.” It’s tricky, and it’s not a particularly easy thing to do.

How so?

Clooney: The best example I can give you is “Batman & Robin.” I don’t think I’ve ever been ripped apart as heavily as I was ripped apart [for that]. I was also still on a television series. So it was, ‘You’re never going to make it in film because of this,’ and ‘He’s buried the franchise.’ And then I was, ‘I’ve got to find a good script.’

And the next project I did was “Out of Sight,” and it was one of the best reviewed films I’ve ever been in. I didn’t suddenly become a good actor. So it really isn’t necessarily about the performer. It’s about the screenplay, the director, all of the other elements that come into play. We get too much credit when things go well, and then we get laid into when things go poorly.

Do you like to work the same way?

Clooney: As a director, I do very few takes, because I feel like you hire the right actor and they’ll do the job right. And the directors that I’ve worked with and had the best luck with — Jason and [ Steven] Soderbergh and the Coen brothers — all have been that kind of director. So I asked Jason, do you like a happy set? I’ve done directors’ round tables — and they forget that I’m an actor — and someone says, “I don’t like my actors feeling comfortable.” And I sit there going, “I’m never going to work with you.”

Reitman: It’s actually astonishing how many directors want chaos, and enjoy a fight too — that’s part of their process.

One of the joys of working with George is that he’s a writer and a director, so he completely understands what I’m trying to accomplish on a daily basis. And we both like to make movies in the same way.

If the film were to go off the rails, what would have gone wrong?

Reitman: The easiest thing to do with these characters in this scenario is to judge the characters in the situations they’re in. You have a guy who fires people for a living, in a very tough economy, has made a very political decision to live on his own and meets a woman who believes the exact same thing. The easiest thing to do at that point is turn your character into some kind of ass that the only type of people who fire people are jerks. And the only type of people who want to live on their own are jerks. . . .

What makes it a tricky film to do is that you don’t want to feel the moral judgment of the filmmaker, and you don’t want to feel the moral judgment of the actors playing them.

Clooney: I thought he was a jerk. This is really a tricky film because you’re talking about very important and timely issues. And we’re making fun of it. That’s a tight, tight, tight rope to walk.

What happened to the scenes with Ryan Bingham in an astronaut suit?

Reitman: I remembered having this brilliant idea that the character, who makes many references to spaceflight throughout the film, would see himself as an astronaut — and have a dream where you see him accomplishing the ultimate spaceflight but ultimately being distanced from everyone around him.

Clooney: With stuff like me hanging from wires.

Reitman: I am happy that it will be on the DVD. However, in a movie that is hyper-real from start to finish, to introduce the idea of a dream sequence, particularly one so surreal, it just didn’t work.

What did the test audiences say about the ending? How do you protect a movie from what is the trained response — which is everybody has got to be happy?

Reitman: Well, I have final cut, so I never worried about the audience having a confused reaction to the ending and getting into a difficult conversation with the studio about the end of the movie.

And one of the first things I ever said to George is, “Look, I think you are going to like the ending. It’s got a ’70s ending.” For my movies, and I hope this continues to be the case, I like half the audience to think one thing and half the audience to think another.

Do you worry about the ability to tell these kinds of stories in the future? Serious movies with ambivalent endings?

Clooney: The secret to all of this is, and I’ve been doing this for a long time now, is keeping films within a really moderate budget, which usually means doing them for no money but investing in them — you get a back-end on it. If it makes money, you make money. But the truth of the matter is — and he’s done three films that don’t fit into any mainstream box — he would have had a lot more trouble from the studios if “Juno” cost $75 million.

Reitman: There are directors who think it’s their God-given right to spend as much of the studio’s money as humanly possible. That to me is like fishing out the entire ocean. You wake up the next morning and say, “Where’s all the fish?” There is a way to make interesting films and be responsible.

Source

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George Clooney still makes “small, smart movies” but it doesn’t always pay, he tells Paul Byrne

For most people, George Clooney can do no wrong. The guy’s a sweetie, always there with a smile, a handshake, a comforting wisecrack. And he’s got the sort of looks that can send most women into a tizzy at 1,000 paces. From the screen. There are those nonetheless who feel that George Clooney can do wrong. They’re called investors.

Recent outings, such as Leatherheads, The Good German and The Men Who Stare At Goats may look good on paper (all-star casts, smart scripts, cool directors), but each lost a truckload of money. Even when Clooney gets some Oscar heat for what he likes to call his “small, smart movies”, a box-office bonanza rarely follows. The likes of Syriana and Michael Clayton ended up more admired than adored. And that meant poor box-office.

“These are risky movies to make,” nods Clooney, “but they’re generally worth the risk. We don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars making the likes of Clayton or Goats, so, they don’t have to hit the No1 spot to make that money back. That said, some of them have done spectacularly bad. And, in quite a few cases, I really should have known better . . .”

highs

Indeed. Having been in this business called show for quite some years now, George Clooney has had plenty of experience when it comes to both the highs and the lows.

His initial flirt with fame came early, landing the role of Ace in 1984 on a short-lived TV sitcom, E/R (not to be confused with the medical drama, ER), three years later he had a recurring role on the smash sitcom Roseanne and played the lead in the non-smash B-movie, The Return Of The Killer Tomatoes.

During these wilderness years, Clooney was, by his own admission, adrift. When fame finally arrived in 1994, thanks to the role of Dr Doug Ross on ER, Clooney was as happy as a pot-bellied pig living in a millionaire’s mansion. And then Clooney kinda blew it. By making mainstream movies — such as The Peacemaker and the disastrous Batman & Robin — that he didn’t actually believe in. Or like. Back to square one.

“It’s pretty unsettling, when you look at a movie you’ve just spent over a year working on, and you don’t actually like it,” says Clooney now. “You can’t even find a kernel of good intentions to hold on to. It’s just a big, wanna-be blockbuster with no heart, no head, and no purpose other than to make a lot of money.

“I knew then that if I didn’t start making movies that I felt some real connection to, I was doomed. I’d either end up failing miserably, and having nothing to show for it. Or worse, I’d end up being successful, and have to keep smiling about films that I detested.”

And so it was that George Clooney embraced the indie route, hitting a home run of sorts with the first release made under his strict new rules and regulations, 1998’s Out Of Sight. Over the ensuing years, the Ocean’s franchise — kickstarted by 2001’s sleek remake — kept Clooney with a trio of blockbusters to fall back on.

With Danny Ocean in retirement since 2007, Clooney has begun to feel ever so slightly vulnerable. Not that he’s made Forbes Top 10 of the Most Overpaid Stars. Will Ferrell hit the No1 spot, the recent Land Of The Lost flop making him Tinseltown’s most unsound investment.

Thank heavens for Up In The Air then, a $25m movie that’s already taken $50m in the US. And with awards season blowing plenty of kisses Clooney’s way right now, that number should keep on rising.

“The reception for this film has definitely been rewarding,” nods Clooney. “And something of a relief. It’s always a risk, when you make any kind of movie that doesn’t play by strict Hollywood screenwriting rules, and so, when you do step outside those boundaries, and people respond, it restores your faith in pushing the boat out there a little.”

In Up In The Air, Clooney plays high-flying employment hitman Ryan Bingham, living most of his life in airport lounges as he moves from business to business to help with their downsizing. Lumbered with a stiff young recruit, and confronted with a one-night-stand that turns into a long-distance relationship, Ryan begins to question his lonely life in eternal limbo. All the while, he’s chasing that millionth air mile that will grant him the ultimate membership card. Think Lost In Transportation. Led by De Niro’s Neil McCauley from Heat. Without the killing. Or the karaoke.

“I just loved this guy from the start,” says Clooney, “largely because he reckons he’s got it all figured out, when, obviously, he hasn’t. The really important part of life has passed him by because he’s been blinded by this chase.”

family

Hmm, the still-single 48-year-old George Clooney must have related to that, right?

“Oh, absolutely,” he smiles. “Here I am, this high-flier, always moving on to the next movie, when I should really just settle down and have a bunch of kids, right? I’m a firm believer in family, but I also enjoy this life that I have. I’m not shutting myself off from emotional attachment, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Perish the thought. Besides, Clooney is too busy with his political work to settle down, the most prominent example of which is the campaigning charity Not On Our Watch he’s formed with the likes of Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Don Cheadle. Their main focus right now is the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

“Believe me, being the son of a news anchorman, I know that celebrities preaching about the wrongs of this world is not everyone’s idea of a smart move, but I’m willing to take that hit if it means that we do actually reach some of the right people here.”

Clooney knows he’s got to walk that fine line between entertainment and education.

“There’s no point in preaching, to anyone,” he finishes, “but you can whisper a little crucial information into people’s ears amongst all those sweet nothings. That usually works for me . . .”

Up In The Air hits Irish cinemas January 15

- Paul Byrne

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Hollywood Interview – George Clooney

‘I’m looking a bit old now’

The movie hunk admits his looks may be flagging – but as he talks ladies, lucky breaks and life as a singleton he’s still shaping up pretty well to us!

Dashing George Clooney might be called a silver fox by many, but when he looks at himself on film he only sees one thing:  ‘I’m old.  It’s an interesting thing to watch yourself grow older on screen.  I was watching Up In The Air and I thought, Jesus, who’s the old grey-haired guy?  And it was me.  I never wear make-up for movies and now it’s starting to show.’

Although 48-year-old George may be sinking deeper into middle age, his famous obsession with elaborate pranks is somewhat pre-teen.  Poor Matt Damon visited his Ocean’s Eleven costar at his villa on Lake Como last summer and was on a strict exercise and diet regime to lose two stone.  Matt was very disappointed when his trousers felt tighter and tighter every day.  George eventually confessed he’d got his housekeeper to sneak into Matt’s room and take in his waistband by an eighth of an inch every day!

It’s no wonder that George’s Italian home brings out his light-hearted side – he describes buying the house as ‘the greatest thing I’ve ever done for myself.’  He once played a trick on the paparazzi, trying to start a rumour that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were going to marry at his villa, by moving trestle tables and a marquee into his garden.  He had reporters befuddled for days.

But as George maintains here, he won’t be staging a wedding for himself anytime soon.  He also reveals the exercise schedule that keeps him in shape, and how he wished he could be like OJ Simpson’s getaway driver!

You’re in great shape, George – how do you keep so trim?

Exercise is the key.  And basketball or a round of golf is better than treading a StairMaster for two hours.  After exercise you find you can deal with the things that were getting on your nerves.  I thin so anyway.

Are you really as great a guy as your reputation indicates?

We’ll change all that, don’t worry!  But really, I’ve had a pretty good life, so there’s no reason to be a butt-head.  The things that are going well so much outweigh the bad – you’d have to be a jerk to complain.

You always have a beautiful woman on your arm, and you’re seeing Elisabetta Canalis now.  Are you interested in settling down?

I don’t know.  I’m glad you asked the question, though.  The funny thing is that in the 20 years of doing this, I have never had that question asked of me before [laughs].  So I will continue to answer it the same way, which is… I don’t know.

You’ve said that you’re not going to get married again and you are not going to have children.  How can you be so sure?

Well, here’s the real answer to that.  I said those things in 1993 in an interview and it has kind of stuck with me ever since.  I now find myself constantly having to defend it.  When you get famous you think it’s important to tell people everything you know and everything you think, but you don’t realize that these will be the headlines down the road.  The truth is that it’s not a consideration.  I’m not considering marriage, I don’t think I will have children – it’s a big responsibility.  But I don’t have this mantra that I have been going around screaming.

Do you think you’ll ever settle down?

I’m just living my life the way I choose to live it and hope it all works out, but I’m also well aware that certain things you can do which are cute when you do them at 20 become less cute when you’re still doing them at 48.

What is more important to you, love or friendship?  And what would you do for your friends?

As opposed to lovers [laughs]?  I think friendship is a part of love, they’re not mutually exclusive.  I have great love for my friends, so I don’t think you really separate one from the other.  But maybe I’m wrong, it’s worked out well for me, don’t you think?  What would I do for my friends?  Do you remember who Al Cowlings was?  He was the guy who drove OJ Simpson’s car when he was running away.  He was sort of made the bad guy for a while.  I always kind of liked that guy.  You know, your buddy comes to you and says” ‘Listen, get me out of here.”  You know you’re going to get in trouble for it but you go:  ‘Alright, I’ll drive, go and get a mask and a passport and jump in the back.’  I always liked that so I like to think I’d drive.

Fame has been known to create mega-egos.  How do you keep yourself down to earth?

The truth of the matter is I grew up around famous people.  My father [news anchor Nick Clooney] was a big start in the world that I grew up in, in Cincinnati, Ohio.  My aunt Rosemary [Clooney] was a big star, a singer.  I saw how little it has to do with you – it’s all about luck and the problem I think with famous people in general is that they actually think they’re geniuses.  You know, you get famous and you start thinking of course I should be famous, I earned it all.  Well, you haven’t, you got lucky.  I got lucky.  I got a TV show that got a Thursday night time slot and it was a massive hit and I get to do movies that I want to do.  If that hadn’t happened I would be going to a TV show or making a living or not.  It’s all luck.  So, once you understand that everything you are doing is based on stars aligning literally than you don’t really take it for granted.  You do sort of enjoy it then.

Priorities chance as you get older – what are the most important things in your life now?

You’re right, they do change as you get older.  You find that the older you get, the more you are able to participate in other parts of society.  The more secure you are in your career the more you can focus on other issues.  But I also find I have this great group of friends – and they’ve been a great group of friends for 20 years – and we find out that the older we get, the easier it gets for us to stay close and spend time together.  It’s a huge part of my life.  So those priorities certainly change.

Do you still remember your very first acting job?

Absolutely.  On TV, the first job I did was a show called Riptide.  Then right after I did a show called Street Hawk where I played my evil twin.  That was good fun!

Interview by Fran Atkins/HotFeatures
Edited by Elizabeth Curran
Photographs by CORBIS, EPA, EMPICS, PA, REUTERS, REX
Taken from British:  OK!  Issue 707  12 January 2010
Scans and Transcript by Sisieq777

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Terrence Rafferty – NY Times-  gives us a great look at George in this article

THERE’S no mystery, none at all, about why George Clooney is a movie star. Guys who are extremely handsome, move well, can project intelligence and humor, appear to enjoy the company of women and possess soft, deep masculine voices have historically done pretty nicely for themselves on the silver screen.

Mr. Clooney, in fact, often seems like a throwback to the leading men of earlier eras: a passing resemblance to Cary Grant, especially when he deploys his wry half-smile; a hint of Paul Newman’s ’60s cool. He’s the kind of actor who could float along forever on his genial presence alone, coast on charm. But he doesn’t. (Or doesn’t always.) That’s the mystery.

His performance in Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” has put him in early contention for this year’s best actor Oscar, and a more effective showcase for his skills would be tough to imagine. Playing an Omaha business consultant named Ryan Bingham, who flies around the country firing people for a living (but with a gentle touch) and occasionally delivers motivational speeches in which he advises his listeners to shed the burdens of responsibility, Mr. Clooney appears in every scene and exudes all-American confidence. Dressed in impeccably cut suits and wheeling his carry-on bag with the deftness of a seasoned pro, he glides through airports and chain hotels as if he owned them, as in a sense he does.

Ryan is on the road, we’re told, for more than 300 days a year, and these impersonal places are — by choice — his true home. Instead of family photos, his wallet is filled with cards proclaiming his membership in the elite clubs reserved for the highest-volume business travelers, badges of identity supplied by airlines, hotels, car-rental agencies. It doesn’t seem like much of a life, but it suits him down to the ground. (So to speak.) The big nowhere is his comfort zone.

What makes “Up in the Air” an ideal vehicle for Mr. Clooney is that everything he has to do in the film is just the smallest shade of difference away from his familiar amiable persona. Movie-star performing is a peculiar, poorly understood subset of the art of acting: it relies on a certain constancy of personality, on the ability to seem at all times as if you were simply playing yourself and to give the audience the illusion that they, somehow, know you — you the person, not just you the character.

For actors like Mr. Clooney, who work without the benefit of wigs and false noses and exotic accents, the line between self and character can be mighty thin. In the olden days — i.e., the studio era, when all but the most ornery contract players made several films a year and did what their bosses told them — popular actors were deliberately confined to a fairly narrow range of parts: typecast, so that moviegoers would always get more or less what they expected when they plunked down their two bits for a Cagney gangster picture, say, or a Gary Cooper western.

Successful actors have a lot more power now. If they choose to, they can typecast themselves — as action heroes, for example, or romantic-comedy leading men. Early in his film career, after the television series “ER” had made him an official hot property, Mr. Clooney toyed with some of the more conventional types: as a romantic comedian, opposite Michelle Pfeiffer, in the pleasant but inconsequential “One Fine Day” (1996); as a stolid, Harrison Ford-like man of action, in uniform, in the dull “Peacemaker” (1997); and even, God help him, as a comic-book superhero, in the catastrophic “Batman & Robin” (1997).

When he finally found a role in which he looked entirely at ease, it was in a film that was neither a standard-issue piece of studio entertainment nor quite an offbeat indie, but something in between: Steven Soderbergh’s tricky comic caper movie “Out of Sight” (1998), based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, and with all the noirish eccentricity that implies. Mr. Leonard’s skewed world, in which competence, wit and unfussy romance are highly prized — and constantly endangered, because there are always way too many thugs and morons about — turns out to be an environment in which Mr. Clooney (if not his character) can thrive.

His performance is all sly looks and bone-dry readings, held together by a general air of barely contained exasperation at the antics of the fools and knaves who surround him. And although he’s a thief and an escaped convict, he looks with undisguised admiration at the United States marshal who’s trying to bring him to justice: she knows her job, and she’s Jennifer Lopez besides.

His style in “Out of Sight” is too elusive, too stylized — it’s like lowlife Restoration comedy — to serve as a repeatable, bankable star persona, but it’s the foundation, in a way, for everything good he’s done since then, the theme on which he works his small, increasingly subtle variations. The larcenous gulf war soldier he plays in David O. Russell’s inventive “Three Kings” (1999) is a tougher, slightly bitterer version of his “Out of Sight” character, and it fits.

And Danny Ocean, the suave criminal he has played in Mr. Soderbergh’s neo-Rat Pack heist comedies “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001), “Ocean’s Twelve” (2004) and “Ocean’s Thirteen” (2007), is the blither, cooler model, with better clothes and better luck. But the Ocean movies, which are among the few box-office hits Mr. Clooney has had, are really the only occasions in the past decade in which he has indulged in purely personality-based acting, allowed himself the luxury of movie-star nonchalance. (And he still manages to break more of a sweat than Frank Sinatra did in the original 1960 “Ocean’s Eleven.”)

He hasn’t typecast himself, really. It’s fairer to say that he has chosen his roles with an extremely canny awareness of his range, which doesn’t extend to the more outré regions of human behavior. (We have Johnny Depp and Daniel Day-Lewis for that.) Even his nutty comic turns in the Coen brothers’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) and “Burn After Reading” (2008) are relatively restrained, especially compared with the out-there performing styles of his fellow cast members.

You wouldn’t want to see him as Richard III, and he’s smart enough not to try. He works the territory of 21st-century American normality, playing — now, at 48 — middle-aged men who are good at what they do and getting by, for the moment, but are beginning to feel stirrings of doubt and dread. These days there are quite a few of those guys around, and they aren’t all the same guy either. Ryan Bingham is one of them, of course, but his slow-dawning suspicion that traveling light might not be all there is to life is a different order of dissatisfaction from the mortal panic felt by Bob Barnes, the C.I.A. field operative Mr. Clooney plays in Stephen Gaghan’s 2005 “Syriana.”

In that film he strays about as far from recognizability as he ever has — though it’s not, in truth, that far. He’s chunkier than usual, more rumpled, wearier-looking, and he sports a beard that he appears not to pay a lot of attention to: the beard of a man who has spent too much time chasing terrorists in the brutal heat and tumult of the Middle East and can’t be bothered to shave. He’s disguised just enough, it seems, for the academy to notice that he’s acting: he won a supporting actor Oscar for the performance.

Whenever an actor as nuanced and unostentatious as Mr. Clooney receives an Academy Award, it’s a bit of a shock, because the academy tends to favor gaudier, more obviously strenuous stuff: the big, sloppy emotions Mr. Clooney doesn’t traffic in. (If he’s nominated, the best-actor race could be particularly interesting, because another likely frontrunner, Jeff Bridges of “Crazy Heart,” is that sort of actor too.)

Being a movie star has its creative pitfalls, chief among them narcissism and laziness. If all you have to do is play your own wonderful self, you needn’t expend much time or energy trying to bring a character to screen life — a unique human being with specific, maybe interesting, quirks and problems. You fall for your own self-created illusion. But if an actor can avoid that trap, there are serious benefits to movie stardom too, and Mr. Clooney seems to know how to exploit the advantage his good looks and charm have given him. The unfair fact is that his kind of appeal can be a fast track to character, like one of those express lines frequent fliers enjoy.

Movie stars don’t have to work for the audience’s attention; they’ve got it as soon as they appear on screen, and once they have it, they can, if they have the inclination and the chops, go about their proper business of exploring behavior in its minutest, most unpredictable particulars. That’s what George Clooney does in “Up in the Air,” while seeming only to be himself.

And it’s what he did in his first best-actor-nominated performance a couple of years ago, as the title character in Tony Gilroy’s dark corporate thriller “Michael Clayton” (2007). In that movie Mr. Clooney plays a depressed and disappointed man: an ex-cop who fixes messy situations for a giant New York law firm and never lets his ambivalence show. Never, that is, until the very end, when, after some unsatisfying, compromised version of justice has been achieved through Clayton’s efforts, he allows himself to relax a little at last.

He flags a taxi, slumps into the back seat and tells the cabbie to drive, and it’s only then that you understand how eloquent Mr. Clooney’s body language has been throughout the preceding two hours — how tensely he’s been holding himself, how warily he’s been sizing up his dangerous world. As he sits in the cab, just riding, the camera stays on him for two full minutes. He does nothing, apparently. His expression hardly changes. But you can feel the weight of what he’s been through in his blankness, his emptied-out eyes. You can’t stop looking at him. It’s a great, daring piece of acting. Only a movie star could get away with it.

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