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George Clooney was thrilled to see the new movie and reminisce about his past.
In Jay Kelly (now in theaters and on Netflix December 5th), the 64-year-old Oscar winner plays a famous movie star who bears no resemblance to himself. It’s clear he wasn’t comfortable with some of the parallels to his real life, he told reporters at the premiere of the Noah Baumbach movie in Los Angeles on Nov. 11.
Jay Kelly’s final scene (mild spoilers follow) sees Clooney’s Jay and his manager (played by Adam Sandler) watching a highlight reel of Jay’s past film work at a lifetime achievement ceremony. Baumbach used real footage from Baumbach’s past film projects, which Clooney said he “didn’t know would happen like this.”
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“The first time he shot it, it was the first time he showed it to me,” Clooney explains. “The first take is in the movie.”
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Clooney was seen holding Sandler’s hand, but admitted it was hardly an act. “I was really surprised by that and a little upset,” he admits.
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“It’s tough,” he quips. “You really have to toughen yourself up to watch 40 years of aging on screen. It’s not that easy with a bad mullet. It’s not great.”
It was around the time Clooney booked his breakout role on the 1980s sitcom “The Facts of Life” that he sported a thick black mullet, as he recently did on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “Look at that hair! That’s a mullet, dude,” he said of a snapshot of himself at the time.
The film, which also co-stars Jay Kelly, Laura Dern, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough and Baumbach’s co-writer Emily Mortimer, is in theaters now and will be available on Netflix on December 5th.
