George Clooney’s gearing up for the release of his Netflix movie, The Midnight Sky, in which he plays a cancer-afflicted, lonely scientist in the Arctic who’s also struggling to survive on post-apocalyptic Earth. That sounds like a lot, and to support the role, he’s covering the GQ Men of the Year issue in a wide-ranging interview that’s well worth a full read. One of the more interesting nuggets, however, involves Clooney responding to a question about how his good friend, Rande Gerber, told a reporter that George once packed suitcases with $1 million apiece and handed them to 14 of his closest friends.
The talk is true, said Clooney, and then he elaborated on how he pulled off this 2013 movie. It, uh, doesn’t sound simple! But it sounds pretty cool because Clooney wanted to return some favors for the guys who loaned him money back when he was a struggling actor. He’d already put them all in his will but he then figured, “So why the fuck am I waiting to get hit by a bus?” And then he had to figure out the logistics of rounding up $14 million in cash. Apparently, there’s an “undisclosed location” where “they have giant pallets of cash” in Los Angeles. The word “heist” does come up:
So Clooney got an old beat-up van that said “Florist” on it, like he was in a heist movie, and he drove downtown, and he got in an elevator with the florist’s van, and he took the van down to the vault and loaded it up with cash. He told no one but his assistant “and a couple of security guys that were sh(tting themselves. And we brought it up, and I bought 14 Tumi bags, and then I packed in a million bucks, cash, which isn’t as much as you think it is, weight-wise, into these Tumi bags.
It’s a heck of a story, including how a “rich old a**hole in” in Vegas later asked the actor why he did this, and Clooney responded, “‘Why wouldn’t you do that, you schmuck?'” What a comeback, and yep, you should go read the full piece at GQ, which includes Clooney tossing a slight jab in his long-standing non-friendship with Russell Crowe.
(Via GQ)
