The real reason women love George Clooney ...0

A few years ago, I sat behind George Clooney at a film premiere. I would have to work very hard to tell you what the film was, probably something important, set during wartime, with his name on the producing and directing credits, because for two hours – and, if I’m being honest, several after – my attention remained fixed on the back of his head.  

I was dizzy, breathing the same air as him, under considerable neck strain from craning through the dark trying to get a look at his facial expressions, and thinking longingly about the ER episode in which he rescued a drowning child from a storm drain. I had always deluded myself that when put to the test, my dignity would triumph over my hormones. Here was the humbling reality. 

I am moved to recall that evening because, in news that has caused dismay in certain corners of the world’s female population, Clooney this week declared himself past it. Sort of. “I’m 63 years old,” he said in an interview with American news programme 60 Minutes. “I’m not trying to compete with 25-year-old leading men. That’s not my job. I’m not doing romantic films anymore.” 

Now, despite Clooney’s obvious, erm, appeal, he has actually been swerving romance roles for several decades. That streak with One Fine Day opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in 1996 and Intolerable Cruelty opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2003 is a distant memory, and hardly typecast him – he has spent much more of his career doing space epics and political thrillers and Coen Brothers comedies, working behind the camera, and larking about with Brad Pitt and the Obamas. Rom coms he has mostly given a wide berth, but his last, 2022’s Ticket to Paradise, was a hoot, in which he and Julia Roberts played a divorced couple forced to put aside their differences and fly to Bali to sabotage their daughter’s wedding. 

Ticket to Paradise looked like a cash cow right out of the 90s but the chemistry between old pals Clooney and Roberts made it irresistible (disclaimer: I watched it on a long-haul flight). He played goofy and curmudgeonly, rather than embarrassing himself by attempting to smoulder, and I was able to invest in and enjoy the romance because Roberts is only six years his junior and their relationship felt perfectly plausible, unlike the traditional Hollywood yarn of some two-dimensional twentysomething woman tailing after a wizened cad who cannot grow up.  

Increasingly, that trope is getting gender flipped: Emma Thompson in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. Anne Hathaway in the awful The Idea of You. And obviously, the wonderful Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, whose age-gap romance between Renée Zellweger and Leo Woodall felt neither gimmicky nor icky (the film also did a clever job of painting Hugh Grant’s own wizened cad as experiencing some kind of personal crisis). These films about “older” women with younger men might balance the books a bit, but in fetishising the men’s youth, they never deliver what people really want from a romance, which is wish fulfilment. The fantasy of the perfect relationship we can really believe will be happy ever after.  

I don’t know if George Clooney has met many of the 25-year-old men he sees as romantic competition, but I don’t think he needs to worry. Twenty-five-year-old actors still usually play teenage boys, or at the very least still look like them. 

At 25 an actor hasn’t even aged out of “crass and pubescent” into “immature manchild”. At 25 they are unable to inhabit the kind of experience, confidence, and self-possession that allows their audience – mostly women – to indulge that fantasy of a viable, perfect, and, crucially, romantic relationship. You’ve Got Mail, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary – the best romances do not feature 25-year-old men.  

square STEVE LAMACQ

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I’ll tell you why George Clooney is so attractive to women. It’s not the charisma, the kind, twinkly eyes, the easy, trustworthy smile, the intelligence, the manners, the charm, the sense of humour, the stubble, the principles, the discretion, the playfulness, the pranks. It’s not that it’s always a surprise to discover he is tall, because he has a habit of leaning in when he speaks to make himself less imposing. Or that for a considerable chunk of his early adulthood his closest companion was a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. 

Well, it’s not JUST all that, anyway. It’s that we never saw him as a 25-year-old man. He got his big break in ER at 33 back in 1994 as the troubled, brooding, womanising paediatrician Doug Ross and never regressed. Ever since, unlike just about every other good-looking man in Hollywood, he has acted his age, resisted infantilisation, has chosen parts where his female co-star is his intellectual equal, not a badly written foil to his irrepressible sexuality or talent, and has conducted his public image and his career, even in his single years when speculation about his love life was beyond reasonable control, with adult, self-aware composure – not chaos.  

Declaring he’s giving up romance movies is one more dignified move right from the Clooney playbook – but no 25-year-old can replace him as the world’s dream man.  

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