60 Seconds To Midnight

“Turning 60 sucks but it’s better than the alternative, which is death,” said George Clooney in a conversation about Netflix’s Midnight Sky, in which he plays a dying man on a dying planet

- Lex Martin

BETWEEN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC and the looming spectre of climate change, George Clooney has had to brave the challenges of lockdown and wash tons of laundry, but you wouldn’t know it from the chipper mood that Clooney displayed during the interview. Playing a dying man on a dying planet in the recently listed Netflix original Midnight Sky, a certain prescience seems to be apparent as he waxed serious about the state of things on our planet, while still believing there is hope for humankind. The 59-year-old chatted via Zoom, presenting his on and off-screen experiences with his signature self-irony and black humour.

This is not your first science fiction film. How did your interest in the genre begin? Was there one movie that triggered it?

The birth of it all for us was 2001. For anyone of a certain age, that’s the high water mark. But there are other films there were sort of sci-fi. Alien came out when I had just graduated high school, and when you watch that movie now, every bit of it holds up. Ridley Scott had a really good run of doing interesting sci-fi films that hold up. I have always been a fan.