“Be careful, George — we need you,” Patti LuPone cries out with theatrical concern.
The “George” the legendary diva is referring to is none other than George Clooney, who is perched on a ladder while a photographer snaps his portrait. He looks confident up there, so LuPone doesn’t have to worry too much. But she’s not kidding about seeing the actor, who is making his Broadway debut as Edward R. Murrow in the stage version of his 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck,” as a vital voice at a time when the entertainment business has been a profile in timidity. The play, which pits the broadcaster against Joseph McCarthy, has taken on new resonance in the Trump era.
LuPone is clearly a fan of Clooney, both for his acting and his outspokenness. And Clooney, despite being one of the most famous people on the planet, seems equally starstruck by LuPone, leaving her wiping away tears as he shares memories of seeing her “blow the doors off” the theater with her musical performances (she returned to Broadway this season as a pot dealer in the comedy “The Roommate”). At one point, Clooney insists on FaceTiming his wife, Amal, so he can brag about spending his afternoon with the theater icon.
Even though their conversation overflows with compliments and funny anecdotes, Clooney and LuPone also share grave concerns about the future of democracy, as well as a firm belief in the power of art to illuminate the darkest times.
George Clooney: I saw you in 1980, in “Evita.” And I saw you in 1993, in London [in “Sunset Blvd.”]. I’m a big nut for musicals — I love them. It’s so rare that there is somebody that actually levitates the audience. The two times that I’ve seen you do it, you changed the atmosphere and the oxygen in the room. You can’t be crying at that — it’s a compliment.
Patti LuPone: [dabbing her eyes] I know. Thank you.
Clooney: I did this interview with Maureen Dowd, and she was talking about pay for actors. And from the very beginning, I said, “I don’t want to be anywhere near the highest-paid actor on Broadway.” I said, “Pay Patti LuPone!”
LuPone: Thank you for advocating for theater actors. There’s nothing special about us to producers, regardless of what we have achieved in our career on the stage. I’m constantly fighting for my quote.
Clooney: Really?
LuPone: Oh, yeah. But this is the actor’s medium, the stage. Nobody’s going to run down and say “Cut.”
Clooney: Unfortunately.
LuPone: But as you’re probably finding out, you have to have a muscle for it, you have to have a discipline for it and you have to have a love for it to do it. When I came backstage, I said, “You’re a stage animal,” because you command the stage. How much time was there between your performances onstage?
Clooney: Forty years. It’s scary to do something new. But I’m lucky. My wife keeps trying to throw surprise parties for me. Every time people will jump out and say, “Surprise!,” and I’ll go, “Hey, how are you doing?” And my wife’s like, “Are you not surprised?” I just have low blood pressure. It doesn’t often appear that I’m nervous when I’m in knots.
LuPone: That’s great.
Clooney: I’m also passionate about it because this play is not just about 1954. It’s about these recurrences that we go through in our government. There’s this feeling that we’re part of a conversation that the audience really wants to have. You can feel everybody leaning forward. Edward R. Murrow was us at our best. He was the first guy into the death camps. He was standing on the roof during the bombings of London. And he delivered us the truth, even as he was risking his life or risking his career.
LuPone: It’s so necessary in these times to hear that elegance, to hear that articulation of an idea and a noble delivery of it. Because where are we? We’re only getting stupider.
Clooney: I particularly am getting stupid.
LuPone: But you know what I mean.
Clooney: I’m missing voices that I really want to hear.
LuPone: I want inspiration!
Clooney: We’re not hearing much of that. At the end of the play, we have this montage of the history of television. And people laugh because we show them Lucille Ball and it’s funny. And then it’s Kennedy being shot, and it’s Martin Luther King and the moon landing. And then it’s Jerry Springer. And people start laughing. But now it’s getting laughs at people’s expense. It’s cruelty. From that moment on, television turns on its axis.
McCarthy’s a demagogue. And demagogues are really fascinating characters because they’re charming and interesting and use fear as a tactic. But it’s important to remember how we get through these things, which is by standing up for what we believe in and reminding ourselves of who we are at our best.
LuPone: Art should be the voice before it’s silenced. This is where I hope our playwrights take the bait and create theater that will reeducate and awaken. We’re in a very precarious position. Art needs to lead.
Clooney: In the film world, you could never really lead. Because it takes three or four years to make a movie. Theater is different because it happens a lot quicker. That’s part of the reason I wanted to make the movie into a play. My father was an anchorman, and when I was raised by my parents, my dad said, “I don’t give a shit what you do in life. I don’t care whatever you want to do, because you have one thing you have to do. You have to challenge people with more power than you and defend people with less power than you. And if you do that, you win.” And it’s a good lesson in life.
Ultimately, we all have basically the same interests. We want our family to be healthy and to succeed, and we want our friends to be healthy and succeed, and we want the best for mankind. But because it’s much easier to get clicks and get attention, the algorithms are designed by Facebook to foment dissent and anger between one another. And the truth is, I still go back to Kentucky to visit my parents; there are Confederate flags flying everywhere. There are people that I’m very good friends with that I completely disagree with. We have to remind ourselves that there’s going to be huge differences of opinion, and sometimes they’re worth fighting for, but it’s worth trying to find common ground.
Let me ask you, what’s it like to see the plays that made you famous revived with someone else?
LuPone: I was very interested to see “Sunset Blvd.,” because I had heard terrific things about it. And I like to see directors that have very strong, very unusual concepts. I didn’t know anything about Jamie Lloyd at all. I knew who Nicole Scherzinger was, but I had never seen her before. And I was thrilled to death to see this production, which was a complete departure from the original, which I was in.
Clooney: And you like it as well or better?
LuPone: I liked it so much better. I wish I had been in that kind of production.
Clooney: What’s the reason?
LuPone: It wasn’t beholden to the movie. Clearly, it’s the story, but it’s not, you know, unfolding in a Spanish villa on Sunset Boulevard, right? It’s brand-new. I mean, I had quibbles; I would love to have seen costumes. I don’t know why they went outside on the street to sing “Sunset Boulevard.” But I thought the whole cast was spectacular, especially Nicole.
Clooney: She must’ve been nervous.
LuPone: I don’t think she knew I was there. I took my son, and he said to me, “Mom, people think they’ve seen a ghost.” Because they saw me. And then some woman filmed me watching it, which was crazy. But it’s audacious. It’s heartbreaking. Nicole’s mad scene is spectacular.
Clooney: That must have been a relief. Because you’ve had them where you didn’t like the performance in something you’ve done before.
LuPone: I did see “Sweeney Todd.” I was disappointed in this revival of it. It’s a Greek tragedy. It was played for jokes, and I didn’t understand that.
Clooney: What was working with Mia Farrow on “The Roommate” like?
LuPone: We were social friends up in Connecticut. And we are now much deeper friends because we went through this experience together. There was great trepidation in rehearsal, because it was just the two of us. And there’s a lot of dialogue. She learned the lines way before we went into rehearsal. I had to catch up. We had a blast backstage though. We would look out there. I always look at the audience before I play to them. I want to see who I have to convince. I look out because I’m going to find the guy that hates me. And Mia started looking out backstage with me, and we would say a little prayer, we would hug each other and we would just say, “Let’s go have fun.”
Clooney: What have you done when cellphones have gone off in the audience?
LuPone: Let me just preface this by saying audiences don’t know what actors do before they stop a performance. I’ve got eagle eyes, because I’m playing to an audience, therefore I look at audiences. If you see a cellphone, you go to your stage manager. The stage manager calls the house manager. The house manager sends an usher down. And audiences don’t know how many times that occurs before actors actually stop a show.
We were doing “Shows for Days” at Lincoln Center, and there was a woman who was texting from the very first minute of the show, and everybody could see her. We all came offstage: “Do you see that woman texting?” “She won’t be there for the second act.” Sure enough, she never left her seat; she was still texting. And at some point I make an exit, and in this part of the play, I would shake the first row’s hands. So I skipped them, went up to her, she put the phone down. I put my right hand on her shoulder and my left hand in her lap and palmed her phone, and the audience saw it. Some of them gasped; some of them applauded. I gave it to the assistant stage manager who gave it to the house manager. What I should have done is held onto it and said, “If you want that phone, you need to come down and talk to me.”
Clooney: Back in the day, I saw James Earl Jones in “Fences.” And I’m sitting next to two old people who were talking the whole time. And James is right at the end of the stage. He’s standing there and he’s doing some soliloquy, and the people next to me are like, “What did he say?” “He said he’s mad because his son …” And James is just staring, but he’s staring at me. Because he can’t see it well enough. And they just keep talking. And he just, in the middle of the show, goes, “I don’t appreciate that shit.” And I was literally pointing at this old lady. I’m like, “It’s not me, it’s this chick.”
LuPone: Are you having fun doing this?
Clooney: You know, we’re filling up the theater. And for plays, that’s not so easy to do. And we have crazy reactions: We’ve had people just standing up and screaming and cheering.
LuPone: This is something that we need to hear more of. There needs to be more dialogue that reinforces morality and truth.
Clooney: When I wrote the film with Grant [Heslov] 20 years ago, I was being called a traitor to my country, because I was against the war in Iraq. And they were picketing my movies. I remember calling my dad and saying, “I think I’m in a little trouble.” And he’s like, “Do you have money?” I go, “Yeah.” And he goes, “Shut up. Because you can’t demand freedom of speech and then say, ‘Don’t say bad things about me.’ If you’re going to stick your neck out and say something, be prepared and take it.”
We wrote it because I wanted to remind myself and others about when the judicial branch and the legislative branch and the executive branch fail, which is what happened in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. The fourth estate has to succeed because it’s the only thing that can hold truth to power. And I do believe Murrow when you hear him say, “We will not walk in fear, one of another. We won’t be driven by fear into an age of unreason.”
LuPone: We need your voice. We need your voice.
Clooney: I never shied away from this shit. And you haven’t either. And I don’t care — if people don’t like it, that’s fine. That’s what democracy is about, right? I didn’t give up my constitutional rights when I became an actor.
LuPone: What I don’t understand about all of this in this country is that we can’t seem to have dissenting views. You’re labeled a communist. You’re labeled a fascist.
Clooney: I don’t care much in terms of what they say. We don’t tell people what to think when we show that montage at the end, for instance. You see Megyn Kelly, who’s come out and said I’m not a journalist. I didn’t say I was a journalist.
LuPone: Neither is she.
Clooney: I’ve at least been to Darfur and Sudan and the Congo and been shot at to try to get stories out. I’m not quite sure what she’s done to be a journalist. Having said that, we only show her words in this play. We don’t tell people what to think. It’s not out of context. We don’t manipulate it. We literally just go, “These are your words.”
Now, people can look at Elon Musk doing his move and go, “That’s a Roman salute.” And maybe it is. We put it on a big screen, and we let you make your own decisions. Having said that, I will argue that when you retweet a statement that says that Hitler wasn’t responsible for the Holocaust — which he did — then maybe it is a Nazi salute. Maybe.
LuPone: Do you ever stop and wonder about Elon Musk? Isn’t he destroying the government? When does he have time to tweet to you?
Clooney: Well, the president of the United States sent some nice tweets. It’s funny because he’s just a New York beast. We’ve all known him for 30 years, and he was just a guy chasing women. But whatever. It’s fine. We’re going to get through it.
LuPone: Do you think so?
Clooney: I’m an optimist.
LuPone: I’m a glass-half-empty girl.
Clooney: You’ve been around long enough to remember 1968. Every city in the United States was on fire. We’d lost Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. We were losing the greatest speakers we’d ever had. The Vietnam War was raging, the Tet offensive, everything that was going on at that time in our country. The president basically resigned because Walter Cronkite said that Vietnam is unwinnable.
We’ve been in much worse places. The only thing that’s different is the source of information and how much and how many different sources. It’s the only thing that’s different. But it’s not nearly as violent, even though it feels violent. It’s not nearly as hopeless as it was at that moment in time. And we’ve done this before. From President Jackson to McCarthy to this, the authoritarian, the demagogue, it goes away when they go away. And he will go away. They don’t have anybody that’s as charismatic as him. He’s charismatic. There’s no taking that away from him. He’s a television star. But eventually we’ll find our better angels. We have every other time.
LuPone: That gives me hope.
Clooney: If you’re a Democrat, we have to find some people to represent us better, who have a sense of humor and who have a sense of purpose. I think we’ll get the House back in a year and a half, and I think that’ll be a check and balance on power.
LuPone: Boy, if we can last that long. Do you go out after the show?
Clooney: I don’t. I get tired at night now. I also have all these lines. When I did “ER” and we were doing medical dialogue the whole time, I’d look at the pages: “Let’s go.” I was 33. I’m 63 now. I’m afraid of losing my lines. And if I go out and have a couple of drinks, it’ll make it worse.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Photographed at The Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center
From Variety US