If there’s one thing you can say about Hollywood star and apologetic Batman George Clooney, it’s that he remembers the people who’ve helped him become successful. Back in 2017, Rande Gerber, a friend of Clooney’s, revealed how a few years earlier, the actor summoned him and 13 other close friends to give them each suitcases filled with $1 million cash. Not only has Clooney now confirmed this story to be true rather than apocryphal, he also revealed a great comeback he gave to a rich person who was astounded he would do such a thing.
To provide some context, George Clooney recalled to GQ how in 2013, he scored a huge payday from doing Gravity. Granted, it wasn’t anywhere the kind of money Clooney would later make from selling Casamigos, the tequila company he started with Rande Gerber and another friend, but it was enough that the actor, who was single at the time and had no prospects of ever starting a family, wanted to pay it forward to the people who’d helped him when he was a down-on-his-luck actor.
So after learning of a discreet way to obtain millions of dollars in cash, George Clooney loaded up his bags of money into a beat-up van, brought the bags back to his place and had his friends come over the next day (all this sounds like it would have fit wonderfully inside the Ocean’s trilogy). Clooney continued:
And I just held up a map and I just pointed to all the places I got to go in the world and all the things I've gotten to see because of them. And I said, ‘How do you repay people like that?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well: How about a million bucks?’ And the fun part about it was: That was the 27th, the 28th of September. A year later, on the 27th of September, just by happenstance, was the day I got married. You know, it's funny. I remember talking to one really rich asshole who I ran into in a hotel in Vegas—certainly a lot richer than I am. And I remember the story about the cash had come out, and he was like, ‘Why would you do that?’ And I was like, ‘Why wouldn't you do that, you schmuck.’
It’s pretty cool that George Clooney followed this incredibly generous act exactly a year later by marrying Amal Alamuddin (now Amal Clooney), so he gets to celebrate two important anniversaries at once. And sure, Clooney could have simply taken his Gravity money and either invested it or kept it locked away, but this is a man who didn’t forget his roots and about the people who assisted him when he was in need. So I can’t blame Clooney for calling this fellow wealthy person a schmuck for questioning why he would give that much money away. Plus, it gives him a fun anecdote to tell at cocktail parties.
George Clooney was last seen on the big screen in 2016, having starred in both Hail, Caesar! and Money Monster, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t kept busy in the entertainment sphere in the years since then. Clooney directed 2017’s Suburbicon and was a director and executive producer on Hulu’s Catch-22 miniseries, where he also Scheisskopf. He can next be seen in Netflix’s The Midnight Sky, which he also directed, but he won’t participate in No Sudden Move after all.
Keep your eyes peeled on CinemaBlend for more news about George Clooney’s professional and personal endeavors, and look through our 2021 release schedule to learn what movies are supposed to play in theaters next year.
