George Clooney is friends with his “Wolves” co-star Brad Pitt, but he’s not above being nice when it comes to Pitt’s collaborator Quentin Tarantino.
During a joint interview with Pitt for GQ, Clooney slammed Tarantino after it was pointed out that Pitt had worked with the famous director (Pitt starred in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, for which he won an Oscar).
“I’m kind of annoyed because Quentin said some bad things about me recently,” Clooney said of the writer-director with whom he worked on Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 vampire film “From Dusk Till Dawn.”
“He was in an interview and he was talking about you or somebody, naming movie stars, and the guy said, ‘Well, what about George?’ I said he’s not a movie star. And he literally said, ‘Name a movie after the millennium,’ and I was like, ‘After the millennium? That’s my whole career,'” Clooney said, to Pitt’s laugh.
“So now it’s like, OK, dude, get lost,” Clooney added. “You can complain to him, because he complained to me.”
From Dusk Till Dawn starring Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney. Miramax
There’s just one problem: Tarantino’s statement may not exist or may have been altered by Clooney’s version of events. Business Insider has been unable to find any evidence that Tarantino made the comments Clooney said. (We reached out to Tarantino’s representatives for comment but did not immediately receive a response.)
But Tarantino has generally criticized the lack of movie stars in this era, particularly due to the “Marvelization” of Hollywood. “There are a lot of actors who have become famous playing these characters,” Tarantino said in a 2022 interview on the podcast “2 Bears, 1 Cave.” “But they’re not movie stars, right? Captain America is a star. Or Thor is a star.”
In a 2022 interview with GQ magazine, Tarantino praised Pitt as “one of the few big-screen movie stars left.”
Clooney, 63, has recently focused on working behind the camera as a director, directing films such as “The Midnight Sky,” “Tender Bar” and “The Boys in the Boat” in the past three years.
Brad Pitt and George Clooney in “Wolves.” Apple TV+
However, Clooney will return to acting in “Wolves,” which will be available on Apple TV+ in September after having its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
The Oscar winner will then star in Noah Baumbach’s new film, which also stars Adam Sandler and Laura Dern.
“I don’t think there’s that many people doing an ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ or a ‘Michael Clayton,'” Clooney told GQ later in the interview, referring to the wide range of roles he’s played in his career.
“And I think one of the reasons I’m allowed to do that is because a lot of the movies I’ve been in weren’t successful. You know what I mean? If you’re not a big success with action movies, nobody’s going to ask you to do more action movies. It’s the same with everything. So part of life for me has been not having big successes so I can do other things and try new things.”
