Latest news with #GeorgeClooney
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
I'm not keen on the Clooneys' ‘no phones' rule for guests
Would you willingly surrender your phone if you were invited to the Clooneys'? Because that's the deal, apparently. 'I now have a phone basket that I use to take everyone's phones away!' Amal Clooney recently told Glamour magazine in a rather stilted 'conversation' with the cosmetics diva Charlotte Tilbury. 'It's important to get that balance where you have time alone with your family and with your friends where people feel like you can have a safe and frank exchange,' she explained. Hmm. I'm fine with shoes-off households (although you reap what you sow when it comes to the state of my socks or my toes). But the phone basket is reminiscent of those aggressively jocular pub signs that say: 'No wifi – talk to each other.' What if you're dealing with a family or work situation, need to hide in the loo and stroke your shiny pocket rectangle to recharge your social batteries, or want to show George a cool meme of an anteater posing? Yes, the Clooneys are the A-est of A-list, with attendant privacy concerns and young children. But if you can't trust people to behave properly, what are they doing in your home? Most house rules imposed on guests feel iffy to me. My husband still recalls, horrified, a sign he saw at an acquaintance's that read: 'In this home, we eat, we clear away and then we talk.' Isn't hospitality about being expansively welcoming and tolerant? If you can't manage that, don't have people over (as someone with the relaxed and patient forbearance of a wounded honey badger, this is my default option). But having talked it through with friends, I'm coming round. Clooney food would probably be excellent, as one said, and fellow guests fascinating – I wouldn't want to be distracted by junk WhatsApps from 'recruitment consultants' when I should be committing every detail of the menu, interior, conversation and outfits to memory for future boasting. So, on balance, I think I'm pragmatically, if not philosophically, OK with it. I'm sure Amal will be thrilled. I look forward to my kitchen supper invitation. Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
I'm not keen on the Clooneys' ‘no phones' rule for guests
Would you willingly surrender your phone if you were invited to the Clooneys'? Because that's the deal, apparently. 'I now have a phone basket that I use to take everyone's phones away!' Amal Clooney recently told Glamour magazine in a rather stilted 'conversation' with the cosmetics diva Charlotte Tilbury. 'It's important to get that balance where you have time alone with your family and with your friends where people feel like you can have a safe and frank exchange,' she explained. Hmm. I'm fine with shoes-off households (although you reap what you sow when it comes to the state of my socks or my toes). But the phone basket is reminiscent of those aggressively jocular pub signs that say: 'No wifi – talk to each other.' What if you're dealing with a family or work situation, need to hide in the loo and stroke your shiny pocket rectangle to recharge your social batteries, or want to show George a cool meme of an anteater posing? Yes, the Clooneys are the A-est of A-list, with attendant privacy concerns and young children. But if you can't trust people to behave properly, what are they doing in your home? Most house rules imposed on guests feel iffy to me. My husband still recalls, horrified, a sign he saw at an acquaintance's that read: 'In this home, we eat, we clear away and then we talk.' Isn't hospitality about being expansively welcoming and tolerant? If you can't manage that, don't have people over (as someone with the relaxed and patient forbearance of a wounded honey badger, this is my default option). But having talked it through with friends, I'm coming round. Clooney food would probably be excellent, as one said, and fellow guests fascinating – I wouldn't want to be distracted by junk WhatsApps from 'recruitment consultants' when I should be committing every detail of the menu, interior, conversation and outfits to memory for future boasting. So, on balance, I think I'm pragmatically, if not philosophically, OK with it. I'm sure Amal will be thrilled. I look forward to my kitchen supper invitation. Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
They're famous, American — and over here
Notable Americans have always come to the UK, from TS Eliot to Taylor Swift, Jimi Hendrix to a werewolf in Eighties London, but the trickle of celebrity immigration is turning into a Thames. Among those to have relocated in recent years are the musician Courtney Love, due to become a British citizen in September; the talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, who has set up home in the Cotswolds; and the actor Josh Hartnett, who is shacked up in Hampshire with his wife, the British actress Tamsin Egerton, and their children. Lena Dunham, the creator of the seminal 2010s comedy Girls, is another American who has 'pulled a geographic', as she put it in an interview with The Sunday Times Style. Dunham has lived in London for four years and has written and directed a sparky new series, Too Much, based on her experiences. She joins Tom Cruise and George Clooney, who spend much of their time here, and their fellow actor John Lithgow, who is about to move to London for eight years while he plays Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter TV series. They are not just crossing the Atlantic from the US either, from the Barbadian Rihanna, who quietly lived in London from 2018 to 2020 and was outed only when she was papped with a Sainsbury's bag, to the Canadian actor Ryan Gosling, who was recently spotted house-hunting in the capital. Then there's Olivia Rodrigo, who is not yet a UK resident but, with her British actor boyfriend, Louis Partridge, and her borderline-scary anglophilia, don't be surprised if that changes. 'I f***ing love England,' the Californian singer gushed during her set at Glastonbury last month. 'I love how nobody judges you for having a pint at noon. I love English sweets — I've had three sticky toffee puddings since I arrived.' Later she put on sparkling Union Jack hotpants and was joined on stage by Robert Smith of the Cure. Short of whistling Colonel Bogey she couldn't have done more to demonstrate her allegiance. Dunham is equally affectionate in Too Much, which stars Megan Stalter, the chaotic personal assistant in Hacks, as a young New Yorker called Jessica who moves to London and falls for a British musician, Felix (Will Sharpe from The White Lotus). Co-stars include the professional Englishmen Richard E Grant and Stephen Fry. The parallels with Dunham's life are shameless — like Jessica, she fell for a London-based indie boy, her husband, Luis Attawalpa Felber, who created the show with her. Felber, who records under the name Attawalpa, also wrote the wistful songs that Felix sings, some of which are on his new album, Experience. Dunham left behind a messy break-up in New York from Jack Antonoff, the musician and producer, to whom Jessica's ex, Zev, bears a suspicious resemblance, and Jessica is obsessed with Zev's gorgeous influencer fiancée, Wendy, who has a touch of Antonoff's wife, the actress Margaret Qualley. Felber denies that the series is autobiographical, making the not entirely convincing point that the leads 'are called Jessica and Felix — it would be autobiographical if they were called Lena and Luis'. He does admit that his and Dunham's 'love story' was 'the germ in the petri dish that created Too Much '. What a romantic. While Jessica meets Felix at one of his gigs in a pub, Dunham and Felber, both 39, were set up on a blind date by friends in London, after she had moved to the UK to direct the first episode of Industry, the BBC/HBO finance drama. They got married just eight months later, in September 2021, in a Jewish ceremony at the Union Club in Soho in central London. 'We knew straight away,' Felber says. For dramatic purposes Jessica and Felix's story has more jeopardy, although they fall for each other with similar speed. 'When you fall in love you feel invincible, you feel safe, which worked so well with the fish-out-of-water thing,' Felber says. There are some excellent lingo gags in the ten-part show, notably when Felix asks Jessica if she was bollocked by her boss and she gasps, 'I would never let my boss f*** me.' Dunham has wrestled with the slang too. 'Pants and trousers always gets her,' Felber says, who advised the show on language and locations. 'I wanted Jessica and Felix to meet at the Ivy House pub in Peckham, for him to play at Dash the Henge [a record shop] in Camberwell, for her place to be in Hackney Road just off where we [Felber and his band] rehearse in Premises Studios.' • 11 of the best things to do in London when it's hot Felber has loved showing his wife around London. 'She sees everything in such an interesting way and it rubs off on you.' Dunham has sung the praises of the Sir John Soane's Museum, builder's tea and crumpets, the ladies' pond on Hampstead Heath and roasts at the Albion pub in Islington, near where she and Felber live in an ivy-covered townhouse. He was particularly pleased to introduce her to Afghan Kitchen, a restaurant down the road in Angel. 'She doesn't like spicy food as much as I do but she loves the dall and the pumpkin.' Having bonded over the comedy of Chris Morris, the main thing they differ on is reality TV — as with Jessica and Felix, she loves it and he can't stand it. Dunham and Felber are far from the only Anglo-American couple in town. The Snow White actress Rachel Zegler, living in London while she stars in Evita, has acquired a local squeeze in the form of the dancer Nathan Louis-Fernand, while Monica Barbaro, who played Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown, was spotted this week at Wimbledon with her Surrey-raised boyfriend Andrew Garfield, and Rodrigo has her own British beau in Partridge, the star of Disclaimer. 'I really love English boys,' Rodrigo said at Glastonbury, dedicating her song So American to Partridge. It was written, she said, 'when I was falling in love with this boy from London and as we were getting to know each other, we were discovering all of these cross-cultural differences. I would make fun of him for eating a jacket potato with beans inside of it. He would make fun of me for pronouncing things very American, like Glaston-berry.' Rodrigo is not the first American woman to fall for the classic British mix of dashing and bumbling that Working Title, which produced Too Much, sold to the world. Jessica in the show moons over Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, and Swift led the way in the real world, dating Harry Styles, Calvin Harris, Tom Hiddleston, Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy in a Brit-packed period from 2012 to 2023. 'He laughs at all my jokes / And he says I'm so American,' Rodrigo sings in So American. 'Oh, God, I'm gonna marry him / If he keeps this shit up.' It's a wittier, less cringeworthy song than Swift's London Boy, an ode to Alwyn that strained a bit too hard for colloquialisms ('Took me back to Highgate, met all of his best mates'). Let's be frank, though, love is often not the prime mover in these transatlantic reshuffles. When I ask Felber about the number of Americans moving to the UK, he laughs and says, 'I wonder why.' Yes, the top reason for many is living in the White House. 'Donald Dashers' include Minnie Driver, the British actress who recently returned to the UK from Los Angeles having said that she 'couldn't' stay in the US if Trump was re-elected; and Love, who told an audience at the couldn't-be-more-British Royal Geographical Society: 'Emperor-core is going on at Mar-a-Lago. It's frightening now.' Providing a counterpoint to the liberal evangelising is Lionel Shriver, the American author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, who lived in the UK for 36 years. 'Democrats tend to have a rosy view of Europe as some kind of liberal Valhalla, where there's justice and recycling for all,' Shriver says. 'Even back to the Bush administration there were waves of people threatening to move to Europe without any realism regarding how much trouble it is or how high the tax rates are. 'This wave of Americans, especially in the entertainment industry, haven't necessarily been keeping close tabs on what's happening in the UK. It's not in a good way. People will be unpleasantly surprised by how badly things work.' Shriver recently moved to Portugal. 'The ambitious people are leaving and there's a flight of wealth now that the UK has made itself hostile to people who have money. Americans who think the politics are better in the UK are naive.' Take that, Courtney. Yet London is undeniably a draw, particularly if you are working in film, where it has become a global centre of production. 'London is a more sensible base,' says Emma Forrest, a British-born screenwriter and novelist who spent several years in Los Angeles before moving back to London. 'They don't develop a film or TV project here if they have no intention of making it — they don't option your book just to fill a quota, they do plan to actually put it on screen, though the pay rate is way lower obviously.' There is also the simple act of walking, Forrest says. 'For an artistic brain walking unlocks great creativity and you can only walk in a very few US cities.' Privacy is another reason some American celebrities prefer the UK . Hartnett told the Guardian that in New York and Los Angeles, 'people only want to talk about your career', whereas here 'nobody cares'. They might care, you suspect, but they would never admit it in public. Does Shriver agree that you are left alone more in the UK? 'If you've got a country that no longer believes in free speech I don't think that's a formula for being left alone,' she says. 'Even Democrats think they can say whatever they want — no they can't, not in Britain.' Some would differ on that point but few would argue about another facet of British life: the capricious weather. It's amazing that we've got this far without mentioning it. Still, there are fewer wildfires than in California and drizzle can have a certain mystique. As Dunham has put it: 'Standing under a bridge waiting for the rain to end in front of a kebab shop is romance in London.' She's caught on quick.
Irish Daily Mirror
4 days ago
- Politics
- Irish Daily Mirror
Trump fingerprints are all voer America's unfolding disaster movie
America has always felt as much like a movie set as a real country. From New York to Disneyland, its sweeping frontier plains to its grand canyons. Everywhere you go are familiar sights and iconic landmarks from the big screen, a place where it's never been hard for fantasy to trump reality. It's the home of Hollywood, where now even politics is just another arc in a grand plot. And increasingly the American genre of choice is 'Disaster Movie'. There's a scene in George Clooney's 2000 film where after days trapped inside the 'Perfect Storm', there is a chink in the angry clouds. A shaft of sunshine lights the faces of the exhausted fishermen. But just as the Hollywood happy ending seems on, the storm clouds close over once more. 'It's not going to let us out,' says Clooney's boat captain Billy Tyne. It's where America seems to now find itself. Trapped inside a perfect storm of ignorance with no way to avert disaster. Donald Trump's supporters reacted with fury when links were drawn from last week's tragedy in Texas to his administration's attacks on science. Over 100 people died in raging floodwaters, including 27 kids and counsellors attending Camp Mystic, a summer camp on the banks of the Guadalope river. The kneejerk attempts to lay the deaths directly at the door of a lack of weather forecasters due to MAGA cuts were premature. But only because they have not had time to fully bite. They will. And Trump and his sycophancy of dunces will have their fingerprints all over each new disaster. The Project 2025 blueprint for his second term spells it out. THE US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is one of the most respected and important authorities on climate and weather. Project 2025 branded it the primary component 'of the climate change alarm industry' and called for it to be 'broken up.' In just a few months, Trump and his backers from the oil industry have launched a blitzkrieg on American science, and its ability to react to the next inevitable Camp Mystic. They have embraced a tenet of the most classic authoritarian playbook of them all - George Orwell's 1984 – in which the Ministry of Truth spreads the gospel: 'Ignorance is Strength.' The Ministry of Trump is similarly trying to erase the evidence of the climate crimes of the fossil fuel industry. It has fired hundreds of scientists and even removed any references to the crisis from websites. Trump's Big Beautiful Bill passed last week was also an assault on tax incentives to transition to renewable energy – a key demand of Project 2025. His loyal followers including press secretary Karoline Leavitt reacted with fury to attempts to blame him for Camp Mystic. They branded the 'politicisation of this natural disaster' disgusting. You could remind them of how their boss ranted about diversity hires in air traffic control while the bodies of plane crash victims were still smouldering on the runway. But really what's the point? Better to be ignorant of facts. In North Carolina they blamed Joe Biden for directing a storm at their state by cloud seeding. I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to find MAGA devotees who believe Trump can divert hurricanes with bolts of lightning from his arse. Orwell also had this advice for a world of creeping authoritarianism: 'We have now sunk to a depth where restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.' So here goes. The conditions created for the Texas rain bomb to form over the Gulf of Mexico (it's probably ok not to call it the Gulf of America on this occasion) were made more extreme, likely and volatile by the fossil fuelled climate crisis. The International Disaster Database estimates that human-caused climate change intensified all of the 10 most deadly extreme weather events of the past 20 years and contributed to more than 570,000 deaths. That included three tropical cyclones, four heatwaves, one drought and two major floods. In all cases they were made more intense, more likely, and more deadly by 250 years of atmospheric warming caused by burning oil, gas and coal. "This study should be an eye-opener for political leaders,' said one leading expert. "We have the knowledge to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy and build a safer, healthier world. But we need political leaders to step up and make it happen." Unfortunately, that's not a movie coming any time soon to America's theatre of ignorance.
Fox News
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Fox News
George Clooney's wife Amal bans phones in family's home to protect privacy
Amal Clooney is laying down the law. When it comes to entertaining guests at the home she shares with George Clooney, the human rights lawyer has a strict no-phone policy. During a recent interview with Glamour, Amal detailed how she protects her family's privacy while constantly being in the spotlight. "Creating private moments and spaces is becoming increasingly difficult," Amal admitted. "But that's also why we entertain a lot at home. I now have a phone basket that I use to take everyone's phones away!" Amal continued to candidly share that she's fiercely guarding one thing – her family's privacy. "It's important to get that balance where you have time alone with your family and with your friends where people feel like you can have a safe and frank exchange," she explained. While being a mom of two to twins, Amal admitted that it's paramount to protect her brood. "I would say becoming a parent means you're more troubled by some of the intrusions. So, we do the best we can to minimize any impact on our children. We don't put our children out there; we've never put their photo out there or anything like that." Meanwhile, the Hollywood couple have appeared to balance being in the spotlight and taking care of their family. As Clooney debuted the Broadway play he wrote and starred in, "Good Night, and Good Luck," in April, his wife Amal was visibly absent. While speaking to reporters, George said Amal missed his big night because "she's with the kids," according to People. The couple's twins are named Alexander and Ella. WATCH: GEORGE CLOONEY TALKS FAMILY LIFE AT KENNEDY CENTER HONORS The Clooney family relocated to New York while he focused on his Broadway debut. In February, George was a guest on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" and shared how his family was adapting. "They love being here. I mean, come on, how do you not love this? It's New York City," George remarked. "Actually, a play is kind of a good schedule because you're working at night. You get to see the kids during the day. So, it's OK," he added. "Good Night, and Good Luck" is George's Broadway adaption of the 2005 movie he directed. The play, like the movie, portrays the true story of CBS news journalist Edward R. Murrow's exposé on Sen. Joseph McCarthy. George proposed to Amal in April 2014, and the couple married five months later in Venice, Italy. Three years later, in 2017, the Clooneys welcomed their twins. The couple have homes all around the world, including Italy, England and a French property roughly 30 minutes away from Château Miraval, an operating winery owned by George's friend, Brad Pitt.
