On a MISSION
GEORGE CLOONEY IS fully in control. The Midnight Sky , his seventh film as director, is precisely the kind of stirring work he thrives on: an apocalyptic drama, it’s told from the dual perspectives of a spaceship crew drifting near Jupiter, and a dying scientist on Earth (played by Clooney), forced to warn the astronauts of the latter’s sudden doom. As he tells Empire from his Los Angeles home while completing post-production: “I made the film I wanted to make.”
It’s an expansive, ambitious sci-fi, bringing together Clooney’s interests both off screen (he is a staunch environmentalist and outspoken political campaigner) and on (this is his third trip to cinematic space, after Solaris and Gravity ). And it’s a film he could have only really made now: the culmination of a long and eventful career in Hollywood, and of hard-won, gradually accumulated creative freedom.
It wasn’t always so straightforward. When he first moved to Hollywood in the early 1980s, Clooney was simply an actor-for-hire, most commonly found in B movies ( , ) or sitcoms ( , ). Fame came relatively late to him (he was 33 when he began starring in TV hospital drama ), and while he’s been happy to weaponise that Golden Age Hollywood handsomeness (in films like the series, his million-dollar smile is practically a character in itself ), it often seemed to be in service of more challenging work — where he could
