George Clooney and Brad Pitt Are Hollywood’s BFFs

Clooney: We’re lucky too. We’re in a profession that doesn’t force you into retirement.

Well, there’s two sides of that coin, right? There is that cliché for actors of: All of a sudden the phone stops ringing.

Clooney: Okay, but there’s two ways of doing this, right? The phone stops ringing if your decision is that you want to continue to be the character that you were when you were 35, and you want a softer lens. But if you’re willing to, say, move down the call sheet a little bit and do interesting character work, then you can kind of—you have to make peace with the idea that you’re going to die! I will walk up to people and they’ll be like, “Oh, you’re older than I thought.” And I’m like, “I’m 63, you dumb shit!” It’s just: That’s life. And so as long as you can make peace with the idea of change, then it’s okay. The hard part is, and I know a lot of actors who do this—and you do too—who don’t let that go and try desperately to hold onto it.

Clooney is about to say more, but now here come two adorable children, followed by a tall, elegant woman in a white dress, who turns out to be Amal Clooney.

“This is Alexander, this is Ella,” Clooney says, introducing his seven-year-old twins, who have already begun climbing all over Pitt.

Amal gives Pitt a hug. She says the property is amazing. “The kids were like, ‘Is this all the same house?’ ”

“Do you guys like animals?” Pitt asks the twins. “We have a bunch of animals over there that need feeding.” He begins reciting the animal population of Château Miraval—donkeys, bunnies, mini horses—as Alexander and Ella cheer.

Eventually, we end up all sitting down for lunch—“Guests on this side,” Pitt says, and so Clooney, his wife, and I all end up in a row, looking out at the property, facing Brad Pitt.

“How did your interview go?” Amal asks.

“We just started,” Clooney says.

“We got eight minutes of interview,” Pitt says.

“Your timing was perfect,” Clooney says.

“I’m sure that’s sufficient,” Amal says to me, laughing.

Out on the lawn, their children have begun scaling a piece of sculpture, which, to be fair, looks like something temptingly halfway between a ladder and a table.

“Try not to do dumb things,” Clooney yells to them, in the weary voice of fathers the world over. “Make good choices.”

Both men start telling Amal about the fashion they were trying on for their GQ shoot.

“Your man was venturing out,” Pitt says.

“What did you do? Are you wearing a radical color?” Amal asks.

“I’m too old to care,” Clooney says.

“That’s another thing about getting older,” Pitt says. “It’s too much work to control things. It’s better to just slot in some way to the current.”

On Pitt: Sweater by Saint James. Pants by Brunello Cucinelli. Shoes by Christian Louboutin. Socks by Anderson & Sheppard. Sunglasses, his own. On Clooney: Sweater by Saint James. Vintage jeans from Raggedy Threads.