GEORGE Clooney is a master in the art of deflecting prying personal questions with a wry joke.
Ask him about his seemingly permanent bachelor status and, without skipping a beat, the 48-year-old announces: “I’m going to get married tonight ... at some point.”
Since he first graced our screens in ER back in 1994, Clooney has been deftly fielding questions about his latest love interest.
If you ask him a silly question, he’ll give you a silly answer.
So skilled is he now at the comic backhander that even the most innocuous of questions is likely to merit a joke response.
Take, for example, his latest film offering, the intriguingly titled The Men Who Stare At Goats, a black comedy set in Iraq, which is the second comic-take-on-war film for Clooney after 1999’s Three Kings.
“I have done a couple of war satire films, Batman And Robin, obviously being the first. Just wearing a rubber suit with nipples on it is a battle,” he says, barely suppressing a laugh.
Hoping for a serious response, he’s asked what drew him to star in and produce the project, along with long-time friend and the film’s director Grant Heslov.
“Well, I’ve known Grant since 1982 and he has some compromising photos of me, so I had to do it. I had no choice.”
On working with Ewan McGregor in the film, he deadpans: “After the restraining order it was really quite hard to actually work with him.”
His dry sense of humour is well documented, but up close it almost seems like a defence mechanism. Perhaps after years of reading absurd stories about himself in the media, Clooney has given up trying to be serious with the press, apparently calculating the most absurd comment possible to outmanoeuvre the ever-hungry tabloids.
Or perhaps, we ask, he’s just a natural joker?
“That’s a little personal,” he says, straight-faced, eyebrow raised.
Joking aside, “gorgeous George” is enjoying a lengthy spell in the UK spotlight thanks to the fact that his three latest films have all been shown at the London Film Festival, where he appeared with his current girlfriend, Italian TV presenter Elizabeth Canalis, on his arm.
The first of these films, Wes Anderson’s motion-capture adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox, sees George in the title role – with Meryl Streep as Mrs Fox.
Up In The Air, released in January, is a romantic comedy about a businessman with a penchant for expensive business trips, and The Men Who Stare At Goats does what it says on the proverbial tin.
Inspired by journalist Jon Ronson’s non-fictional bestseller, the film follows a reporter (Ewan McGregor) who discovers a top-secret experimental wing of the US military – the New Earth Army – a legion of Jedi-style warriors rumoured to have psychic powers and the ability to kill a goat just by staring at it.
Through a sequence of flashbacks, we see a younger looking Clooney, as Lyn Cassady, with long hair and an army uniform, being taught “psychic” skills by the programme’s arch-hippy founder, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges).
Despite the film’s stellar cast – Kevin Spacey plays Cassady’s nemesis, Larry Hooper – everyone just wants to talk about the goats.
“I tell you, this goat was a particularly nice goat. We spent a long time together; he wanted to go over dying around me, so we worked on that for a while,” George jokes.
“The funny thing is, the goat was a great actor. He walked in and we were like, ‘OK, stare at the camera’, and he was like, ‘Yuhh’. If I could get Ewan to do that it would help.”
Growing more serious, George explains that he and Grant had been eyeing up the script for some time.
“This is a script that’s been around town for a while. All of us were aware of it for a bit and it was named one of the best unmade screenplays, so we were all sort of anxious to get our hands on it and see if there was a way we could do it – and Grant had the right ideas.”
The character of Cassady is, by turns, insightful and quite stupid. With his breakthrough film role in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, George is no stranger to what he glibly calls “the idiot syndrome”.
“The first time I did the first scene with the Coen brothers in O Brother, I was sort of playing him dumb and they said, ‘You’re the smartest guy in the room’ – I thought that was really good direction and it sort of made sense.
“I always find those characters are funny to me, although I must say, as wrong as Cassady seemed at times, a lot of the stuff he did actually worked, so you’re never quite sure how truly or not with it this guy is.”
Some of the funniest moments in the film come when Cassady refers to himself as a Jedi, something the original military unit actually called themselves.
“None of us realised when we read the script and, when we’d hired Ewan, that Ewan had actually been a Jedi (in Star Wars). It was in the script and it’s actually what they called themselves,” explains George.
“So we were doing this scene in the hotel room where Ewan volunteers to come to Iraq and he says, ‘Who’s a Jedi?’, and I go, ‘I am’, and we just sat there and looked at each other a minute and started laughing.”
Come January, Clooney is bound to be among the names touted for awards glory, but with so many films out at the moment, does he feel like he’s competing with himself?
“I have been competing with myself for years,” he jokes.
“A lot of the time, when it seems like you’re bringing out films for awards season, you’re really doing it because it’s actually when grown-up films come out.
“It’s not easy to bring out a film like The Men Who Stare At Goats in the summer. It sort of gets swallowed up, and it’s not easy to bring it out in February necessarily because it’s sort of a dead-zone time for films, so this is really about the right time for the film to come out.”
As for his future projects, George is back to his joking best.
“No more farm animals and no more children, that’s my new motto.”
The Men Who Stare At Goats is released in cinemas on Friday, November 6. Fantastic Mr Fox is out now.