In a long profile in The New Yorker, Ian Parker calls George Clooney a "Hollywood emperor" and "America’s national flirt," whose "stardom has had an air of earlier, pre-therapeutic times." Parker notes that, while Clooney is often described as the closest thing we have these days to Cary Grant in his prime, "the comparison falters at the level of physical movement. In one’s memory of Grant, he leans back a little. Clooney leans forward. Clooney’s masculinity is ambitious: he is a pickup artist, a flicker of locker-room towels...he is the fellow at the end of the bar, who, on a scale running from James Stewart to Jack Nicholson, has found an enviable midpoint of courteous roguishness." In some of the movies he's made lately that have been closest to his heart, Clooney has also insisted on letting his characters remain alone, in a way that's almost unthinkable for Grant. In both Syriana and Michael Clayton, his love interests wound up on the cutting room floor, a decision that Clooney was all for. Speaking of Michael Clayton, he told Parker, “If he’s loved, then he has a buffer, and somehow it isn’t as awful.”
Clooney comes across as a guy who, having achieved major stardom after many years in the trenches, is intensely aware of his place in the Hollywood pecking order but treats it as a joke, as part of his campaign to be seen as a regular guy. During the buildup to this year's Academy Awards season, he appeared at a Newsweek-sponsored panel discussion where, on behalf of his entire profession, he made an elaborate show of fealty to Daniel Day-Lewis, and here he recounts an evening in the company of other big-time actors, including Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem, where “we got hammered and we all came to the conclusion we wanted to be Javier Bardem.” And though Clooney takes his politics seriously, a few years ago "he seemed to read politics through the prism of his own expertise in handling public perception. He would often mention an unnamed magazine that, before the Iraq war, had his photograph on its cover with the word 'traitor' running 'across my chest.'” Parker was surprised to learn that the slandering rag in question was "the National Examiner, a second-rung supermarket tabloid; its “Traitors!” cover, in late February, 2003, did have a picture of Clooney, along with five other stars, as well as a competing story about the death of Kathie Lee Gifford’s dog. Although it isn’t for anyone but Clooney to say how insulting he found this, it does seem an obscure, even camp, place to find an insult."
These days, Clooney's primary public, non-movie focus is on Darfur, the subject of a speech he recently delivered at the United Nations. Afterwards, "He answered questions, and then moved to a suite of offices on the thirty-second floor, where he gave a dozen separate television interviews, speaking in a very low voice, without taking a break. Clooney’s publicist and a few others borrowed an office, marked 'Situation Room,' until the news that rebel forces were poised to topple the government of Chad caused the U.N. to ask for the room back, and the publicist moved into the corridor." Meanwhile, his professional focus may be drifting to what he'll be doing, perhaps behind the camera, when, as they say in Scorseseland, he ain't pretty no more. (I guess you have to worry about something.) The article is of course timed to coincide with the release of Leatherheads, the third movie he's directed (and the first that he's directed and taken the starring role in), a movie with a period setting a throwback slapstick-romantic-comedy feel that may be Clooney's way of addressing the Cary Grant thing head-on, but on his own macho turf. It's been judged a disappointment, and this has actually occasioned news stories, which may have been in the pipeline since the movie's release date was shoved back from last fall. But Clooney might take some comfort in knowing that there are other famous movie actors who turn out bombs all the time without anybody thinking that it's news.