Cinema

George Clooney’s Three Habibis and the Syrian Children of Lebanon

Clooney shows off his newborn twins, explains why he and Amal are putting Syrian refugee children into Lebanese schools, and takes on racism in Suburbicon.

Husam Sam Asi 21 September 2017

Husam Sam Asi with George Clooney, September 2017. Photo: Armando Gallo for the HFPA.

George Clooney has always been known for his playful personality, his cheerful face and his constant smile, yet in my earlier interviews with him I always sensed a discontent, even a sadness, behind that cheerful cover. That feeling began to change once the Hollywood star married his Lebanese wife, Amal Alamuddin Clooney. His joy became plainly real, and it came from somewhere deep inside him. When I met him in Toronto during the film festival two weeks ago, his happiness seemed to have reached its peak, thanks to the twins born at the beginning of June. Like any proud father, he took his phone out of his pocket after shaking my hand and opened it to show me their photographs: his son, Alexander, who looks bigger than his sister, Ella. “I had one habibi, and now I have three,” he said, laughing.

Without lifting his eyes from the pictures, he added: “Today is the first day I’ve been away from them since they were born. When my wife sent me these photos, I started sighing, ‘I wish I was with my children,’ because time with them is the height of my happiness. It’s a great feeling. I can’t wait to get home.”

Clooney is Hollywood’s most famous and most attractive star. The world’s most beautiful women pursued him, and he had relationships with some of them, yet he always felt that something was missing from his life. He did not realise that the gap came from his bachelorhood, because he had tried marriage before, with Talia Balsam, from 1989 to 1993, and the experience was so painful that he vowed never to repeat it. Now he admits that Amal opened the doors of happiness for him. “Your love for someone grows every day. I couldn’t be more in love with her or happier with my family, and I’m in a wonderful place in my life. I’m 56, which is late to start a family, and I confess I didn’t think this would ever happen to me. All of this is the icing on the cake. I always thought my career would be the centre of my life, and not necessarily a marriage. When I got both, I felt lucky to have Amal in my life, and then suddenly these two little ones arrived, and they make me laugh every day.”

Besides making him laugh, the two little ones deprive him of sleep and force him to give up a great deal to meet their demands. “All my friends have children, so I expected some exhaustion, but what surprised me is that twins are more complicated and more challenging, and not only in what they need. They don’t care that I’m there, and I can’t give them anything except a bottle of milk, which makes them happy. I have every admiration for my wife, who wakes up every two hours to feed them while I sit and watch the most beautiful sight in the world.”

The twins have turned the global star’s life upside down. He spends less time with his friends, and he has cut back on work trips and on the charity work that used to take him to faraway places such as Sudan and China. He stays at home with Amal to look after them. “I wasn’t aware of the radical change children make to your life,” he says, laughing. “Suddenly you’re responsible for other people’s lives in a completely different way from the responsibility I’ve felt in the past towards people in faraway countries or in my own country, and as you know, I feel responsible towards the oppressed of the world. It’s completely different when they’re your own children and you hope to be an example they’ll follow. I want them to understand that they were given things by birthright that other children are denied, and that they could easily have been born in Syria and had completely different lives. Being born somewhere doesn’t automatically give you privileges. You have to take part in other people’s lives. That’s my job in raising them, and it’s very important to me.”

Schools for Syria’s children in Lebanon

Clooney has always been active in charity work and in standing up for the world’s weak. One of his most important causes was defending the people of Darfur in western Sudan and drawing attention to their plight. He risked his life to get there while fighting raged between government-backed tribes and local rebels. Since the Syrian revolution broke out six years ago, he has kept asking me how to help the Syrian people in their ordeal, and Amal seems to have paved the way for him to set up a charity that opens schools to the children of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Last month the Clooney Foundation for Justice announced a $2.25 million partnership with Google, backed by a $1 million grant from HP, to put nearly 3,000 Syrian refugee children into seven Lebanese public schools with UNICEF.

“We’re going to start by enrolling 5,000 pupils, because I believe the fastest way to defeat terrorism in general is to give people schooling and education, to give them hope and give them something to do. The worst thing you can do is shove them into a room and leave them to stagnate. We can’t do that. Our goal is to solve this problem before it gets worse, and we hope to grow the project to the point where we can offer schooling to every refugee child.”

He says he chose Lebanon because his wife is Lebanese, and it mattered greatly to both of them to help her country carry the burden of the refugees. “This country has a population of four million people and it’s hosting two million refugees. That’s like the United States taking in 100,000 refugees. Imagine that. It’s crazy,” says Clooney, who has put $20 million into the project from the sale of Casamigos, the tequila company he founded four years ago for a modest sum and sold this summer for $700 million. “Don’t forget we split that between three partners,” he adds, laughing.

Clooney says he had to sell the company because demand for its tequila, which is produced in Mexico, grew so fast that the US authorities began warning him about the scale of his imports from Mexico, and he decided to sell up to avoid trouble. “We were very lucky and made a huge amount of money. So Amal and I said, we live a good life and we have plenty saved, so let’s put some of this money into our foundation. That gives us the freedom to avoid raising money from people we can’t stand,” he says, laughing.

In the ten years since I first met Clooney, I have never heard him complain about anything in his private life. He has always been grateful for what life has given him, and he reminds me how hard his early years were, when he cut tobacco in the fields for $3 an hour and spent his weekends going door to door selling insurance. When I pressed him to name one thing missing from his life, he sighed and said: “I have no right to complain, because I know there are many people facing far greater difficulties than anything I face. But I’ll tell you the truth: I’d love to walk with my wife and children in Central Park, and it hurts that I can’t. I really miss the privacy that fame has taken from me. Please understand, this is an observation, not a complaint,” he says, laughing.

Suburbicon and the walls of America

Family life has not slowed the actor and director down. This year he directed Suburbicon, from a screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen, which had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival at the beginning of September before screening in Toronto. Amal accompanied him in Venice. In Toronto he came without her, alongside the film’s stars, among them Matt Damon and Julianne Moore.

Suburbicon is set in 1950s America, in the home of a white family whose head (Damon) conspires with his wife’s sister (Moore) to get rid of his paralysed wife (also Moore) and collect her life insurance. He hires professional killers to do the job, but things get complicated after his wife’s death, when the evidence against him begins to pile up.

That is the main plot, written by the Coens. Clooney added a parallel subplot about the black neighbours, who are attacked by their white neighbours, to expose the racial segregation of the period and give the film a political dimension that reflects America today.

Clooney acknowledges that the Coens did not deal with racism in their original screenplay, because the subject was less heated in the 1990s, when they wrote it. “I decided to add it when I heard the talk about building walls and the incitement against Muslims and Mexicans during the presidential election campaign. What inspired me was a documentary, Crisis in Levittown, where white people built a fence around their black neighbours’ house and raised the Confederate flag on it.”

Clooney opens the film with a postman discovering that a black family has bought a house in a white neighbourhood and moved in. He rushes off to warn the neighbours as if disaster had struck, and the neighbours respond by building a fence around the house and pelting it with stones and Molotov cocktails. “This is real,” Clooney says. “And the white neighbours denied they were racist. They said they supported segregation until black people were educated.”

“The black family in the film stands for every ethnic minority,” Clooney adds. “When Trump talks about making America great again, he means going back to the Eisenhower days of the 1950s, when white people lived in prosperity and everyone else suffered discrimination. He wants to put obstacles in front of immigrants, even though immigrants are the ones who made America great. How can you ban people from seven Muslim countries that haven’t produced a single terrorist attack on American soil? It’s madness. It makes me angry every time I hear about discrimination against these minorities.”

Clooney’s aim in making Suburbicon is a noble one, but the execution fails. The film has flopped with the critics, and perhaps at the box office too, because it crams two unrelated plots into one film and leaves the viewer confused. Ironically, he devoted his promotional campaign to talking about racism in America and never mentioned the film’s main story: the greed of the white family’s head, which ruins him and his family. Clooney would have done better to leave the crime story to the Coens and write a separate screenplay about racism.