New York – New York (AP) – George Clooney made waves in July when He called Joe Biden to leave the presidential race, citing diminished capacity. For Clooney, there was no option to remain silent.
“They raised me to tell the truth and tell the truth means telling him when he is not comfortable”, the actor and director and the great democratic reinforcement tells Associated Press. “I did what I grew up and taught me to do. That’s it.”
There was an inevitable reaction, as there was when he was qualified as a traitor for speaking against Iraq’s invasion, but Clooney received the successes.
“Telling the truth to power or risking like this, we have seen it about our history,” he says. “We have been here and we survive these things and we will survive.”
The posture of truth to the power of Clooney takes another step this spring while making its debut on Broadway, telling the story of the legendary reporter Edward R. Murrow in a Adaptation of his 2005 film “Good night and good luck.” The actions begin on March 12.
Murrow, who died in 1965, is considered one of the architects of the United States transmission news and perhaps his best moment was to oppose Senator Joe McCarthy, who cynically created paranoia of a communist threat in the 1950s.
“This is a story about who we are at our best, when we keep our own feet to the fire, when we verify and balance it,” says Clooney. “What scares now and the difference between Murrow’s time is that we have now decided that the truth is negotiable.”
In the movie version, which Clooney co -wrote with Grant Heslov, Murrow’s role went to David Strathairn and Clooney played the CBS executive Fred Friendly; This time, Clooney takes Murrow’s mantle. When he and Heslov read for theater investors, he has just played Murrow and the financial ones agreed to sink his money into the work, in the condition of Clooney Stay on paper.
As in the film, the work version will have images of the true McCarthy on the screens and the stage will look like a writing room with several dozen outdated monitors that mix ancient and new images.
The transition to Broadway makes a lot of sense since many of the film’s reviewers said it seemed a lot to a play. Actually, it was originally conceived as a live television movie, an idea after Justin Timberlake presented Janet Jackson’s nipple In the mid -2004 Super Bowl Show and frightened any notion of live network events.
“It is an incredibly literary work,” says Tony winning director David Cromer. “It’s full of debate. It is full of well -reasoned and very complex arguments, is this the right thing? Is this right now? What happens when we do this? How do we say this?
The two -time Oscar Clooney winner returns to Murrow at a time when journalists are under fire of the new administration of the United States and Denied access for not following the White House conversation points.
“We did not decide to re -assemble or do the work for real political reasons,” says Heslov, a frequent Clooney collaborator who is also making his debut in Broadway writing. “It turns out that the environment could be ready for it.”
Murrow had a great presence in Clooney’s house while growing. His father, Nick Clooney, a veteran journalist, worked as a television news presenter and presenter in a variety of cities, including Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. He also wrote a newspaper column in Cincinnati and taught journalism at the American University.
“I am the son of a journalist, an adequate journalist, a guy who tells the truth. My father is still fighting for the good fight, ”says Clooney. “I believe in that. I believe in all the idea of how this works. “
Clooney is part of a star group of Hollywood veterans who arrive at Broadway this season, a list that includes Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Jim Parsons, Sarah Snoak and John Mulaney.
Clooney insisted before arriving that he didn’t want to be the best paid actor on Broadway. He reflected the time that his house mortgaged and a salary of only $ 1 was paid to finance the film version of “Good night and good luck.”
“For me, it’s like, paying Patti Lupone most of anyone on Broadway. Pay someone who has paid their quotas. It shouldn’t be someone who is doing his first Broadway play, “he says.” I can’t do that. I don’t want to be part of that. It doesn’t make sense to me. “
The ticket office for a ticket to see it in the Winter Garden is white, even before the previous views begin, but Clooney diverts that to Murrow, it is not me, he suggests, it is the character he is playing.
“Edward Murrow’s words are words that qualify us,” he says. “It’s an ointment for madness. And I think people are excited to be in a room and share some of those conversations.”
Clooney has not made a complete play since he obtained his capital card in 1986 in Chicago as the comic relief in “Vicious”, on the Punk Sid Vicious icon. “The majority of the cast members I am working with did not be born when I did my last work. So scare, “he says.
He thought he had lost his chance in Broadway, a notch in the desire list of many actors. He is now 63 years old and would mean uprooting his family for months.
“I have succeeded in my career. I do not say that I have not been successful, but I had not done anything on Broadway and I thought it was too late, “he says.
“They had offered me a couple of plays for which I did not believe it was correct, and I thought that if I was going to do it, I should do something for which I was right. And this was an opportunity that I thought: ‘Well, I know how to tell this story. I may not do a great job with that. You know, I can really ruin it, but I know what is required of the thing ‘”.
