NEED TO KNOW
George Clooney got a blast from the past watching his new movie.
In Jay Kelly (in theaters now and on Netflix Dec. 5), the Oscar winner, 64, plays a famous movie star not unlike himself. Speaking to PEOPLE at the Noah Baumbach movie’s Nov. 11 Los Angeles premiere, it’s clear some of the parallels with his real life were less than comfortable.
The final scene of Jay Kelly — light spoilers follow — shows Clooney’s Jay and his manager (played by Adam Sandler) taking in a highlights reel of Jay’s past cinema work at a lifetime achievement ceremony. Baumbach used real footage from the actor’s many past screen projects, a move Clooney says he “didn’t know they were going to do.”
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“The first time he shot, it was the first time he showed it to me,” explains Clooney. “The first take is in the movie.”
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When he’s seen grabbing hold of Sandler’s hand, Clooney confirms, it’s barely acting. “I was really surprised by that — and a little disturbed,” he admits.
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“It’s hard,” he quips. “You have to really fortify yourself for seeing 40 years of aging on screen. It’s not so easy with a bad mullet. It’s not great.”
It was around the time he booked his breakout role in the 1980s sitcom The Facts of Life that Clooney sported a thick, dark mullet, as he recently showed on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. “Look at that hair! That’s a mullet, dude,” he said of a snap of him from that era.
Jay Kelly, costarring Laura Dern, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Baumbach’s co-writer Emily Mortimer and more, is in theaters now and on Netflix Dec. 5.
