Time Magazine has a new interview with George Clooney, in which he appears on the upcoming cover with the title “The Last Movie Star.” The article seems to say very little despite how long it is, and comes off as this fawning fanboy piece about how excited the journalist is to have Clooney come over to his house for dinner. Clooney is a nice guy and an old school movie star of the highest order, claims author Joel Stein, who is embarrassed that he didn’t cook the lamb properly when Clooney was over, helping with dinner and making him feel comfortable in his own home.

Clooney talked about how frustrated and depressed he was after going to Darfur as a UN representative, wondering if he made a difference or if he just made the places and people he visited targets for more violence:

“I’ve been very depressed since I got back. I’m terrified that it isn’t in any way helping. That bringing attention can cause more damage. You dig a well or build a health-care facility and they’re a target for somebody,” he says. “A lot more people know about Darfur, but absolutely nothing is different. Absolutely nothing.”

[From Time.com]

He also says that he is careful about the roles he takes because he doesn’t want to get pigeonholed:

“After Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck I was offered the Richard Clarke book and every issues movie,” Clooney says. “I didn’t want to be the issues guy because if the issues change, you’re done. The Facts of Life is a good example. If you’re a young heartthrob—which I never caught on as—those fans not only abandon you, but they’re embarrassed to have liked you. It’s the same thing with issues movies. I want to just be a director.”

[From Time.com]

Clooney talks a lot about how he hates Bill O’Reilly, the abrasive and often inaccurate Fox News conservative commentator:

One person Clooney will mess with—the thing he keeps coming back to the more we drink—is what a massive loser Bill O’Reilly is. It’s an irrational feud because every time O’Reilly gets to be as important as Clooney, O’Reilly comes out way ahead. But Clooney can’t help himself. He keeps talking about O’Reilly, and the little traps he’s set for him and how thrilled he is when he falls into them. It’s as if Clooney loves O’Reilly because he gives him permission to be an irrational 8-year-old. Maybe that’s why anyone loves O’Reilly. But he is also the anti-Clooney, donning a public persona, one that’s humorless and incapable of self-effacement. It’s as if someone created for Clooney his own Elmer Fudd.

[From Time.com]

As for his night with Clooney, the journalist says they had two bottles of red wine and two bottles of dessert wine over pasta and undercooked lamb, and that at just after midnight they were “both pretty buzzed.” Then he tells this bizarre story about how Clooney climbed into the rafters over his ceiling trying to fix something.

It’s past midnight; we’re both pretty buzzed. He’s telling me how he wakes up every morning at 5:30 to the hoots of a giant owl and how he climbs into his hot tub so he can hoot back, mesmerized by nature, like Tony Soprano and his ducks, when this alarm starts shrieking. Clooney, not a man of inaction, especially in a moment of crisis like this, stands on my dining-room table, unscrews a panel in the ceiling and, finding nothing, makes me go outside and carry a huge ladder with him up two flights to my garage upstairs—where he climbs into an area I’ve never dared go, crawling along the beams with a screwdriver between his teeth. Finding nothing, he climbs down, knocks the dirt off his jeans, blows the dust out of his nose, rinses his hands and returns to the table. The shriek starts again, and Clooney thinks for a few seconds, ducks down and yanks the carbon monoxide detector out of the outlet. “Either it needs a battery,” he says, “or we have six seconds to live.”

[From Time.com]

Then Clooney drove home alone at 1:30 according to this article. If he was doing shit like climbing in the ceiling at midnight would he have been sober enough to drive by then?

He’s not my favorite actor, but he deserves credit for trying to make a difference in the world. He traveled to Africa using his own money. The trip must have been very difficult for him, and he sounds realistic about it. He does seem like a decent, albeit overly-smooth guy despite his womanizing ways. Whether he’s the “Last Movie Star” or not remains to be seen. He certainly knows how to work a journalist into writing a positive piece about him, that’s for sure.

Update: Here’s the video, where Clooney was wandering around with a flashlight looking for the source of mysterious beeping.