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" PLUS: See the January Cover and Watch a Video Interview with Clooney on the iPad &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Hey, this is Einstein. I guess he&amp;#039;s part cocker spaniel or something. I got him out of a shelter about a year and a half ago. I was looking for a dog because I hadn&amp;#039;t had one for a while \u2014 and I wanted one that was house-trained. I&amp;#039;m just terrible at house-training dogs. So I go online and see Einstein. They had a whole film about him. It was actually really sweet. You see him all beat up and shit in the shelter, and they show how they cleaned him up. God, I love this dog. So I called and said, &amp;quot;I like Einstein!&amp;quot; The woman goes, &amp;quot;Well, we don&amp;#039;t know if Einstein will like you.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, can I meet with Einstein?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes, we&amp;#039;ll bring him to your house, but if he doesn&amp;#039;t like you, he can&amp;#039;t stay. We have to have good homes for these dogs.&amp;quot; She sounded very serious. Okay. I have this really long driveway, and I open the gate for them, and I start to panic that Einstein is not going to like me. So I run into the kitchen, where I have these turkey meatballs, and I rub them all over my shoes. This woman opens the door, and who knew Einstein was such a food whore on top of everything? He throws himself at my feet. She says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve never seen him react like that, ever!&amp;quot; And she left him with me on the spot. And forever, now, he just thinks of me as the guy with meatball feet. He loves me. I can do no wrong. He follows me everywhere. I get asked a lot about getting into politics. I say, &amp;quot;Take a look at politics. You tell me what seems appealing about that.&amp;quot; If this were a Republican president and Republican government, the advisors around it would be selling this as the most successful three years of a presidency in years. They&amp;#039;d start by saying, &amp;quot;When my guy took office, we were losing four hundred thousand jobs a month. That would mean fourteen million less jobs if we continued along that pace. And it stopped immediately. We saved the auto industry. We passed a health-care bill that no one could pass&amp;quot; \u2014 although Republicans wouldn&amp;#039;t have wanted that. &amp;quot;We killed Osama bin Laden.&amp;quot; You could go down the list of things that you could brag about. But Democrats are terrible at selling. So they&amp;#039;re just kind of apologizing, and everybody feels disillusioned. They always think of Hollywood as a cash center. We sell really shitty movies sometimes and make a billion dollars. They should stop looking at us as a cash register to get funding. And they should ask themselves: Who are the best sellers in the game? Harvey Weinstein. Sit down with Harvey Weinstein. Sit down with Jerry Weintraub, who is a brilliant P. T. Barnum guy. Sit down with these brilliant showmen who know how to sell product. Then go out and figure out how to pitch your guy. Negative ads in politics are a pretty crappy thing to do, but if the right guy gets in office, it&amp;#039;s the right thing to do. The question is: At what point do you give away a portion of your soul, and to what extent does it actually cost you? Here&amp;#039;s the thing: We used to lead the world in making things. But we stopped making things. We don&amp;#039;t make anything anymore. I miss that. Hollywood still makes things. We still export a couple billion dollars&amp;#039; worth of product overseas. Original, new product. Some people might not agree that it&amp;#039;s original or new, but basically it is. There aren&amp;#039;t a whole lot of industries that are exporting things right now \u2014 big time with big money. We spent about twenty years making money off of making money. And that&amp;#039;s a very dangerous place to exist. I didn&amp;#039;t put money in the stock market. To me that&amp;#039;s like Vegas without the dancing girls \u2014 none of the fun, no gambling or dancing or drinking \u2014 and you don&amp;#039;t get to participate. So I paid off my house in cash when I could. It&amp;#039;s about having a foundation for when things go bad. I still have that mentality. When things go badly, I&amp;#039;ll have this piece of land I can sell first, and then I have this piece of land I can sell second. You always think that way.  MORE: See the January Cover and the Best of Clooney in Esquire &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; You get better as an actor over time if you&amp;#039;re growing. Like singers. My aunt Rosemary, later in life, couldn&amp;#039;t hit a note and couldn&amp;#039;t hold a note. But she was a better singer \u2014 much better. She said, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have to prove I can sing anymore.&amp;quot; Just serving the music makes a huge difference. There&amp;#039;s a simplicity to how you&amp;#039;re doing it that makes it easier to convey. There&amp;#039;s another trick \u2014 good writing. Good storytelling sets you up. There&amp;#039;s a scene at the end of Michael Clayton where I get into the car and say, &amp;quot;Just drive.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a close-up of me and we&amp;#039;re driving. Everybody really loves that scene because it just stays on me the whole time. And people ask, &amp;quot;What was going through your head?&amp;quot; The truth of the matter is if you showed that scene at the beginning of the movie, people would say, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m bored out of my mind.&amp;quot; So that shows you that it&amp;#039;s not the actor that&amp;#039;s doing that \u2014 it&amp;#039;s the story that led to that and got you there. The trick as an actor is not to sell it. Let the story do the work. Somebody asked me, How can you relate to being a father? Well, I&amp;#039;m also not running for president, but I played that role in Ides of March. I wasn&amp;#039;t an actual lawyer when I did Michael Clayton, and I don&amp;#039;t fire people for a living like I did in Up in the Air. Go down the list. It&amp;#039;s just a job. An acting job is playing pretend. I&amp;#039;ve been a child of somebody&amp;#039;s. I&amp;#039;ve been an uncle. All my friends have kids. I&amp;#039;m around kids. I have an understanding of what it is. And I also have a really good script that informs me what is required of this father. Because, for the most part, the father I play in The Descendants doesn&amp;#039;t resemble any of the fathers that I know. I don&amp;#039;t have friends who have the kind of issues that this guy has. So a lot of it is just the information you get from the screenplay. There are Method actors that are really wonderful. I don&amp;#039;t bash anybody&amp;#039;s way of working because the results are the only thing that matter in this game. But for me, I don&amp;#039;t have to do heroin to play a heroin addict.   Nigel Parry   I have a real interest in pushing some of the limits of things that studios don&amp;#039;t want to make. Because I can. I won&amp;#039;t be able to at some point in the near future. But right now I can, and while I can, I want to do it. So when you&amp;#039;re eighty years old and they ask you what you did, you can go, &amp;quot;When I had the keys to the car, I drove it as fast as I could and as hard as I could. I took it to places that the owner didn&amp;#039;t really want me to take it.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s a fun thing to do. Understanding that at some point they&amp;#039;re going to come back and repossess the car. I don&amp;#039;t mind that. I just want to be able to say we gave it a shot when we had the time. There&amp;#039;s ten of us, we&amp;#039;ve been best friends for thirty years. Ten guys. And their wives, and their kids, are all family now. I&amp;#039;m not big on keeping up on the phone, none of us are. Some guys I won&amp;#039;t talk to for two months and then you pick up the phone and hear, &amp;quot;So, anyway.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s no guilt or where have you been? or what&amp;#039;s been going on? or why haven&amp;#039;t we talked? There&amp;#039;s an ease to it. I remember when Richard Kind&amp;#039;s dad suddenly died. This was about seven or eight years ago \u2014 maybe more. Richard&amp;#039;s a really wonderful character actor. He loved his dad, and he was very grown-up about passing on the news. He called and left a message: My dad died, I&amp;#039;m in Chicago, the funeral&amp;#039;s going to be in New Jersey tomorrow morning. I&amp;#039;ll talk to you when I get back.  This was five o&amp;#039;clock at night. I was in L. A. Rick is a Jew. They bury the next day. They don&amp;#039;t screw around. They get you right in the ground. So I called up Michael, Grant&amp;#039;s brother, and told him Richard&amp;#039;s dad died. He said, &amp;quot;We should be there.&amp;quot; The guys were all around the country. One was in Denver. One was in San Diego. So I got a jet and we spent the whole night flying around the country. San Diego, Denver. We landed in Trenton, New Jersey. Richard didn&amp;#039;t know anything about it. We got to the synagogue, this giant synagogue, with the people up front. And Richard didn&amp;#039;t know we were going to be there. We&amp;#039;re sitting there, the nine of us in the back row. And Richard gets up to speak about his dad and he sees his nine best friends there. And what I loved about it was that all of us understood that there are moments in your life that are real passages. Your father dying is a very big one. Because you are now the man of the family. We understood how important that was at that time.  There is a great joy in the patience of slowly setting the table and sitting back and watching it happen. Just waiting and waiting. Seeing them slowly take the bait. Some practical jokes could take years \u2014 years and years and years. And the beauty of not panicking and going, &amp;quot;Heh, see what I&amp;#039;m doing to you?&amp;quot; In general, we do them because they make us laugh hysterically. Before there were digital cameras, if anybody&amp;#039;s wife set their camera down, immediately it was brought into the bathroom, where you&amp;#039;d use it to take pictures of your ass, and then you&amp;#039;d stick the camera back in its spot. I remember once, my buddy Thom was having a party for Harry Hamlin. It was Harry&amp;#039;s birthday. And Harry had a film camera. He set it down in the midst of the party. I grabbed the camera and went over to Grant. &amp;quot;Grant, I&amp;#039;ve got Harry Hamlin&amp;#039;s camera! Go in the bathroom and I&amp;#039;ll take a picture of your ass.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No!&amp;quot; Grant says. So I see Michael. &amp;quot;Michael, come on! In the bathroom, I&amp;#039;ll take a picture of your ass with Harry Hamlin&amp;#039;s camera.&amp;quot; Michael says, &amp;quot;No.&amp;quot; So then Richard Kind comes in. &amp;quot;Hel-lo!&amp;quot; And I say, &amp;quot;Richard! We&amp;#039;ve all taken pictures of our ass on Harry&amp;#039;s camera!&amp;quot; And Richard goes, &amp;quot;Okay!&amp;quot; We go into the bathroom and I set up to take his picture. He drops his pants down. Usually we&amp;#039;d just frame the ass, but I framed it so you could see Richard&amp;#039;s face, too. He was looking over his shoulder. What you have to understand is that none of us really know Harry. We know him like, &amp;quot;Hey, hi, Harry, how are you?&amp;quot; But that&amp;#039;s it. The party was at Thom&amp;#039;s house because Harry&amp;#039;s wife was a friend of Thom&amp;#039;s wife at the time. About a week later, Thom plays us his message \u2014 from Harry Hamlin: &amp;quot;Yes, uh, Thom, it&amp;#039;s Harry. I want to thank you again for a great birthday party. Could you explain to me why Richard Kind is showing his ass on my camera?&amp;quot; To this day, we have our Harry Hamlin jokes because of it. It&amp;#039;s not a joke at Harry&amp;#039;s expense. All we have to do is say Harry Hamlin and everybody thinks about Richard Kind&amp;#039;s butt. I keep thinking: Now that every single human being on earth has a camera phone, where are all those UFO pictures? Remember you used to see those pictures. Some guy just happened to have a Polaroid when the UFOs appeared? Either it was all bullshit, or my theory is that the martians have decided, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t go down there, man. All those fuckers have cameras now.&amp;quot; Ides of March I did for scale \u2014 scale as a director, scale as an actor, scale as a writer. And I don&amp;#039;t have any back end on it. So I&amp;#039;m not going to make any money after that. I enjoy living in a nice house and having a nice life. So I do two or three commercials overseas a year to sort of fill in, because they pay pretty well. The wedding one in Norway was great. I usually try to keep away from anything that would have to do with me personally. I always think the commercials should make fun of me, sort of as a personality, but I try to keep my personal life out of it. But they called and sent the script, and the idea was funny. This woman in Norway wakes up and she&amp;#039;s married to me. It makes a big difference when you&amp;#039;re working with the Carol Burnett of Norway. She&amp;#039;s great, and it turned out fantastic. That commercial in particular helped fund a satellite project that keeps an eye on the Sudanese border to try to hold these war criminals in check. The satellite project costs about a million and two a year. So I&amp;#039;m always looking for a gig like that. People forget that I was married. I love that, Will he get married? I don&amp;#039;t talk about it because I don&amp;#039;t think about it. I don&amp;#039;t ever question other peoples&amp;#039; versions of how they live their lives or what they do. I understand that it&amp;#039;s a subject of interest for people. But sometimes it exists only because it came up years ago. It becomes this conversation piece that constantly resurfaces. Everybody sort of has their own versions of what they think I am and what they think that is. I&amp;#039;m just living my life and doing the best I can. The rest of those versions, there&amp;#039;s not much I can do about. No matter what I do, I&amp;#039;m somehow upsetting someone in some way or making somebody happy. I can only live my own life and my version of it. My life isn&amp;#039;t focused on results. My life is really focused on the process of doing all the things I&amp;#039;m doing, from work to relationships to friendships to charitable work. If I focused on results, if it&amp;#039;s only about the ultimate results, I&amp;#039;d be a failure in Sudan, I&amp;#039;d be a failure in film, I&amp;#039;d be a failure with my friendships, I&amp;#039;d be a failure in relationships. I look at it as an ongoing process.   Nigel Parry Jacket, shirt, and trousers by Giorgio Armani; shoes by Church&amp;#039;s.     The most dangerous places are not what you would think. It&amp;#039;s not Janjaweed militia taking us and shooting us. Or the Muslim Brotherhood saying, Shoot their plane out of the air. We were there during a restricted travel time and they sent a message on the Internet saying to shoot us out of the air. Not that they could, necessarily. There were plenty of those versions that we went through. I was with Jane Holl Lute, who was an assistant secretary-general at the UN at the time. Her husband&amp;#039;s Douglas Lute, who was in charge of military operations overseas. So between them they were sort of involved with most military operations in the world. And I never had my bearings right. We were in Khartoum, which is clearly not a very safe place. We&amp;#039;d be in one place and I&amp;#039;d be ducking down, and she&amp;#039;d be like, &amp;quot;What are you ducking for?&amp;quot; And then we&amp;#039;d be in the Congo, and we&amp;#039;d be in a pit, and I&amp;#039;d be standing looking at stuff, and they go, &amp;quot;Get down!&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s not like you&amp;#039;re in New York and you know where to go and where not to go. But the scariest moments are the random ones. Like when two fifteen-year-old kids with Kalashnikovs drop a tree in the middle of a dirt road. Those are the ones that make you think, Well, I&amp;#039;m not going to get killed for standing against Omar al-Bashir, the guy who&amp;#039;s charged in The Hague for war crimes. That&amp;#039;s not what&amp;#039;s going to get you hurt. What&amp;#039;s going to get you hurt is two fifteen-year-old kids who really don&amp;#039;t understand life yet, but they&amp;#039;ve got Kalashnikovs and you&amp;#039;ve got a truck and stuff that they would like. In the middle of nowhere. It&amp;#039;s really not political. It&amp;#039;s more random crime than anything. You can get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. You&amp;#039;re always aware. And fame won&amp;#039;t play any great part in the outcome. You can&amp;#039;t pull out your, you know, 1997 Sexiest Man Alive People magazine and say, &amp;quot;You really shouldn&amp;#039;t shoot me. You&amp;#039;re doing the whole country a huge disservice.&amp;quot; Part of the trick is to put yourself in that position. We put ourselves there because part of the story is that you&amp;#039;re putting yourself in harm&amp;#039;s way. That allows you to come back and do a junket with thirty news outlets \u2014 which makes a difference in the amount of attention you&amp;#039;re generating for the cause. I talked with the president at one of those fundraisers some months back, and I asked him, &amp;quot;What keeps you up at night?&amp;quot; And he said, &amp;quot;Everything. Everything that gets to my desk is a critical mass. If it gets to my desk, then no one else could have handled it.&amp;quot; So I said, &amp;quot;So what&amp;#039;s the one that keeps you up at night?&amp;quot; He goes, &amp;quot;There are quite a few.&amp;quot; So I go, &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s the one? Period.&amp;quot; And he says, &amp;quot;Pakistan.&amp;quot; I get that: There&amp;#039;s the question of whether Zardari&amp;#039;s government is actually in control, or whether the military is. And how close the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or whoever else is to having their hands on real weapons of mass destruction. It&amp;#039;s the closest government there is to allowing those weapons to either be used or sold to places that we really wouldn&amp;#039;t like to have those weapons. That&amp;#039;s a concern for all of us. It&amp;#039;s interesting to see the world through world leaders&amp;#039; eyes. I&amp;#039;ve met with a few over the years. And I have to say, I wouldn&amp;#039;t want the responsibility that those people have. I like having singular focus on singular issues. I don&amp;#039;t sleep much. Five to six, I&amp;#039;d say. You could argue that people, as they get older, sleep less \u2014 probably because they&amp;#039;re afraid of dying at some point. I know my parents don&amp;#039;t sleep much. I know that I used to be able to sleep until noon when I was younger. I couldn&amp;#039;t fathom staying in bed until ten now. I wouldn&amp;#039;t know what to do unless there&amp;#039;s a football game on. At Lake Como, you live your life the way you&amp;#039;re supposed to live your life if you&amp;#039;re lucky. The two-hour lunch. The glass of wine. Everybody sitting around and talking. Dinner starts at nine and it ends at midnight or one. There are conversations that go on for long periods of time with really interesting people, always. We get these wild, eclectic groups of people that have no business being together. Kofi Annan with Willie Nelson and Woody Harrelson and one of my buddies with a stripper. Samantha Power, who wrote her last book out under a tree at my house. Some athlete and some Italian designer. People I don&amp;#039;t know well. Regis Philbin&amp;#039;s stayed. There are wild, strange conversations that I really adore. Hosting is work. It means you don&amp;#039;t get to go up to your room and disappear and take a nap. Like everybody else does after lunch. I&amp;#039;m talking about hosting, not hosting a dinner party, but hosting people staying in your home. You have to have everything set up. &amp;quot;Okay, guys. Whoever wants to take a boat out, we&amp;#039;ll take a boat out at three. Three to five. If we want to take the scooters to get gelato, we&amp;#039;ll do that from 5:30 to 7:00.&amp;quot; At a table of fifteen, you can&amp;#039;t let one person sit in the corner and not participate. You have to go, &amp;quot;Hey, Frank. Tell us a story about ...&amp;quot; You want everybody involved at the table. There are quite a few things that the devil could tempt me with. I would argue youth. But I could argue against it in so many ways. The only reason that being younger would in any way be appealing is that I wish I could play sports at the level I now understand them. I could dunk a ball when I was in high school. But now I know how to play the game really well. I remember getting into varsity basketball games and literally being just lost \u2014 just absolutely panicked on what to do. And now I would know exactly what to do. I could be tempted by youth if I was allowed to hold on to all the wisdom that I&amp;#039;ve gotten. In everything, not just sports. In life. In acting. I&amp;#039;d be tempted by youth only so I could continue doing it a little longer. Keep looking for new trouble. Published in the January 2012 Meaning of Life issue, on sale soon Interviewed by Cal Fussman, September 30, 2011 MORE: See the January Cover and the Best of Clooney in Esquire, and Read All of Our What I&amp;#039;ve Learned Interviews in One Place &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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