George Clooney, Making His Broadway Debut in Good Night, and Good Luck, on the Ongoing Battle for Truth
(Photo: Emilio Madrid)
In the Playbill for Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney devotes his limited page space to a shamefaced confession: The last time he set foot on an Equity stage was in June 1986. “He has never appeared on Broadway,” his bio reads. “So… buckle up.”
Clooney still seems mildly embarrassed when discussing his theatrical debut—not because of the play or his performance, but the city it happened in. “It’s always bad to say you did a play in Los Angeles, because people just look at you and laugh,” he told New York Magazine in 2016. The play was Vicious, a gritty retelling of Sid Vicious’ final days and the murder of Nancy Spungen. Clooney played a male prostitute drug dealer—a role he has described as comic relief. (“The actors … do what they can,” a Chicago Tribune critic noted in his review.)
At last, here he is—63, self-effacing, candid about his nerves and treading the boards in New York. “I never expected to come to Broadway,” Clooney told Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek recently. “I kind of thought that ship had sailed long ago.”
Preparing to play Edward R. Murrow, the crusading CBS broadcaster, Clooney freely admits that he has struggled to get off book—a book which he co-wrote—and he makes no effort to hide his deference to his castmates.
“We did a table read on Monday with all these fantastic young actors—beautiful, smart, talented. And I’m sitting there thinking, I haven’t done a play since they were born. It’s been a long time. So I’m rightfully nervous." (Grant Heslov, Clooney's co-writer, echoed the sentiment with eerie exactitude: "He has a lot of really long speeches. He's rightfully nervous.")
Clooney added, "More than anything, I don’t want to do a disservice to it. That’s my greatest goal. I have people I’m responsible for.”
He flashes a grin. “Listen, it’s fun to be 63 and go, ‘I don’t know.’ That’s not a bad thing. It’s humbling.”
Clooney has earned a reputation for being one of the more politically outspoken figures in Hollywood. “Gets me in trouble sometimes." Asked about the timing of the production—centering on Murrow's battle with the fear-mongering senator Joseph McCarthy—Clooney responded, "We are constantly having to wage this battle for truth. We had to do it during Vietnam, we had to do it during the Civil Rights Movement, we had to do it during the Women's Rights Movement ... It's not something new to us now. But it is a battle that has to be waged."
He added, "It's important to remember, though, that this wasn't and isn't designed to be a civics lesson. It's an entertainment. We thought, This is a story about us at our best as Americans."
Good Night, and Good Luck is a project close to the heart of George's anchorman and news director father, Nick Clooney; when George was a child, Nick had a habit of standing on a chair and reciting Murrow’s “Wires and Lights in a Box” speech.
“It’s just really good to hear those speeches,” said the director David Cromer. “It’s really good to watch those broadcasts. It’s really, really moving to hear those words again and to hear them fresh every couple of years.”
George feels he's made his father proud with his commitment to the story. "I think he's more proud of this than anything I've done. Because it matters to him ... And for me, being able to do something that's very personal for my father makes it very personal for me."
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