Smash hit

All this may come as a surprise to anyone who remembers Clooney in his fluffier incarnation as a soap opera charmer whose early Hollywood work included a stint as Batman. He now grimaces when reminded about that tight-fitting Batman costume (which he refers to as “my rubber suit with nipples”).

It was just as he was beginning to speak out against the war in Iraq that Clooney was asked to do Syriana, a film based on a memoir by Robert Baer, a retired CIA agent, about his real-life adventures in the murky world of Middle East oil. The director was Clooney’s friend, Stephen Gaghan, best known for his work on Traffic, the Oscar-winning drugs drama.

Clooney initially signed on as executive producer, knowing his name would help Gaghan to raise funding for the film. When the actor who signed to play Baer dropped out, Clooney grew a beard and put on weight to play the CIA man, not as a James Bond superspy but as a flabby, dishevelled misfit struggling to understand the intrigues around him. Time magazine called Syriana “light years from the standard Hollywood movie”.

Clooney insists that the film is not anti-Bush: “It’s basically a statement about 60 years of flawed policies in the Middle East. This isn’t stuff that all came together in the last five years.”

Yet the film, due for release in Britain in the new year, is provocative and relevant to terrorism in the Bush era. “We have a storyline about two Pakistani boys who slowly, bit by bit, become suicide bombers. I thought it was important to say that you can’t just call them evil, you need to understand what creates those elements and what parts we are responsible for. Obviously I’m not condoning or defending horrible, heinous acts, but there’s a reason these things happen.”

Making Syriana turned into a personal ordeal for Clooney. During filming he fell backwards off a chair, banged his head and began to suffer hideous headaches. Applying his years of experience as a fake ER doctor, he concluded he had suffered an aneurism and was about to die of a stroke. “It was none of those things — it was a hole in my spine,” he explains. He had three small bones removed from his neck and back (by real doctors) and the killer headaches dissolved.

By chance, Syriana came out in America just after Good Night and Good Luck, Clooney’s stirring account of the battle between Ed Murrow, the legendary American broadcaster who reported the second world war blitz from London, and Senator Joseph McCarthy, the fanatical communist hater who saw reds under every bed.

Clooney’s choice of a journalist hero for his second directing venture (the first was the critically praised Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) owes much to his close relationship with his father, Nick Clooney — a former television news presenter, army helicopter pilot and brother of the singer Rosemary Clooney — who ran as a Democrat for election to the US Congress last year. He lost but his relish for politics is clearly shared by his film star son.

There was an obvious danger that Good Night might turn into a leaden political diatribe but most critics were dazzled by the film’s subtle allegories. Clooney has been tipped for writing and directing Oscars and the film’s lesser-known star David Strathairn, who plays Murrow, could find himself up against Clooney’s own Syriana performance in the best actor race.

All of which has left Clooney in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose his projects. The money he has earned from recent blockbusters such as Ocean’s Eleven has allowed him to work on smaller films where the rewards are mainly in the mind.

Clooney believed in Syriana and took an actor’s fee of $250,000 (£140,000) — about 1% of the going rate for male superstars; for Good Night and Good Luck he accepted only symbolic pay — $1 for writing the script and $1 for directing. The film cost $7m to make and has already earned $20m but none of it will go to Clooney — he signed his rights away to get the film distributed. “I’ve actually had a very good career once I realised it wasn’t about trying to make money,” he says.

As for the future, he plainly relishes his new status as Hollywood’s leading liberal: “Yes, I’m a liberal and I’m sick of it being a bad word.