George Clooney Is ‘Not Doing Romantic Films Anymore’ Because ‘I’m 63 Years Old’ and ‘Not Trying to Compete with 25-Year-Old Leading Men’

variety.com:

Zack Sharf Digital News Director George Clooney is putting his romance movie days behind him. Speaking to “60 Minutes” to promote his starring role in the Broadway production of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” Clooney told his fans that he will no longer act in “romantic films anymore.” Clooney’s last romantic-comedy was 2022’s “Ticket to Paradise” with Julia Roberts, which grossed a decent $168 million at the worldwide box office. “Look, I’m 63 years old.

I’m not trying to compete with 25-year-old leading men,” Clooney said. “That’s not my job. I’m not doing romantic films anymore.” “60 Minutes” noted that Clooney’s “sexiest man of the year phase” in the early 2000s marked one of the heights of his film career, to which the Oscar winner agreed that it “was a big time” for him.

However, that time is over. Across Clooney’s filmography, he appeared in such romance films as 1996’s “One Fine Day” with Michelle Pfeiffer and 2003’s “Intolerable Cruelty” with Catherine Zeta-Jones. “Ticket to Paradise” proved buzzy for marking both Clooney and Roberts’ long-awaited return to the genre.

Roberts told The New York Times that she had turned down romance films for 20 years because of bad scripts. “People sometimes misconstrue the amount of time that’s gone by that I haven’t done a romantic comedy as my not wanting to do one,” Roberts said. “If I had read something that I thought was that ‘Notting Hill’ level of writing or ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ level of madcap fun, I would do it.