George Clooney Has Opened Up About Family Life – And Shared How He Keeps The Romance Alive

George and Amal are pretty private people – especially considering how famous and acclaimed both of them are. We all know that George is a beloved actor, but don’t forget that Amal has a very impressive CV, too. She’s a world-renowned human rights lawyer who’s done some incredibly important work throughout her career.

Naturally, seeing Amal and George posting lovey dovey pics online would be adorable. But neither of them actually have public social media accounts! So, if you want details about the couple’s marriage or their kids, you have to wait until one of them does an interview.

The time you’re most likely to hear from George is when he has a movie to promote. It just so happens that from late 2020 onwards he was promoting The Midnight Sky – a Netflix film he co-produced, directed and acted in. And it’s actually the movie’s plot that got him talking to the media about his family on this occasion.

Though what is the film actually about? Well, it centers around an old man who is dying in the midst of a global apocalypse. He’s also trying to communicate with some surviving astronauts and look after a child at the same time. It’s quite far removed from the actor’s life of course – apart from the bits about parenting and relationships.

Plenty of interesting details about George and his relationship with his wife and kids have come out on the promo tour for The Midnight Sky. Overall, it’s been a pretty good substitute for him not being on social media. And there’s one detail that particularly touched fans when they read about it.

It has been pretty obvious for many years that George really adores his wife. In fact, he has apparently loved her from pretty much the moment they met! They reportedly first crossed paths in July 2013 after being introduced by an unnamed friend. Touchingly, by April of the following year George had already proposed.

While George and Amal were still getting to know each other, though, they communicated with emails. In 2018 the former told David Letterman on his show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, “I didn’t know if she wanted to go out with me. I just thought, you know, we were buddies.” But yes, she very much did.

George threw out some more info about those early days while promoting The Midnight Sky in November 2020. He told the show CBS This Morning, “We never talked about marriage when we were dating. I asked her out of the blue, [and it] took her a long time to say yes. I was on my knee for like 20 minutes, I finally said, ‘Look, I’m gonna throw my hip out.’”

But of course they did get married, and now George frequently gushes about his wife in interviews – sometimes unprompted, too! He told CBS This Morning, “There is no question that having Amal in my life changed everything for me. It was the first time that everything that she did and everything about her was infinitely more important than anything about me.”

Things then changed again for a second time when George and Amal’s twins came along. They were born in June 2017, and the couple released a statement marked with the latter’s famous humor. They wrote, “This morning Amal and George welcomed Ella and Alexander Clooney into their lives. Ella, Alexander, and Amal are all healthy, happy, and doing fine. George is sedated and should recover in a few days.”

It’s clear that George absolutely loves being a father. He’s known to pull out his phone at press events and show the media pictures of the twins. You won’t get many Hollywood A-listers doing that, but honestly getting George to not talk nonstop about his wife and kids might be a challenge.

George revealed some more fun tidbits about his family on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in December 2020. He told the host, “We did a really dumb thing, which is, [the twins] speak fluent Italian. I mean fluent Italian – at three. But I don’t speak Italian, my wife doesn’t speak Italian, so we’ve armed them with a language!”

The family clearly have fun together, and they did so even during the 2020 lockdown. George revealed to Kimmel that he’d “wood-stained the entire house” at the time. Asked if he’d done a good job, the actor quipped, “Probably not, but I was busy for a while. It kept me out of the room with the kids speaking Italian.”

When questioned about the kids’ mealtimes, George once again brought the conversation back to Amal and her accomplishments. He said, “I cook for the family. I’m the chef. My wife, she does amazing things. She gets journalists out of jail in countries like Azerbaijan and Egypt, but when it comes to cooking, she makes reservations.”

That same month – while still on the promo trail for The Midnight Sky – George spoke to Entertainment Tonight. And during the interview, he talked about what his new film had taught him about parenthood. The star couldn’t help but mention his wife first, though. He said, “She is the smartest person in every room she walks in. I am always very proud to be standing next to her.”

George also mused on being an older dad and the challenges which came with that. He went on, “I will be 60 this year. There are times where [the kids] say, ‘Okay, now we are going to hop like a frog all the way to bed,’ and I am like, ‘I will hop a few. I don’t know if I can go all of the way to the bedroom.’”

That’s not the only physical challenge the actor has faced, however. In 2018 George was involved in a serious motorbike accident which left him fearing he might die. While on the way to a set, the actor crashed into a car and was flung into the air. George went right through the windshield – but luckily he was wearing a helmet.

George was sure he was going to end up either paralyzed or dead. The star told GQ magazine in 2020 what he’d felt while lying on the ground. George explained, “… My kids were like a year old, and mostly it was just the thought that this was it and that I wasn’t gonna see them again.” Yet, remarkably, he had no major injuries.

After that very close call, Amal apparently forbade George from getting on a motorbike again. That seems fair enough, we think. Discussing his marriage and family, the actor mused, “… I’d never been in the position where someone else’s life was infinitely more important to me than my own. You know?”

The Midnight Sky interview tour was actually a goldmine for fans of George. But why? Well, he discussed life as a husband and father frequently and in great detail. The actor even talked about what he and Amal did to keep the romance alive in their marriage now that they were parents. And it might not be what you were expecting!

Talking to the AARP website in January 2021, George revealed that he and Amal used handwritten letters to show their love for each other and the kids. Every year he and Amal spend a weekend away together. Plus, they leave letters for the twins bearing a dated record of where they are.

George and Amal also send each other romantic handwritten messages every few months. The former told AARP, “Even in lockdown, I’ll write a letter and slip it on her desk, or she’ll write a letter and leave it under the pillow. I’m a big believer in letters.” Awww.

The actor has apparently always loved that method of communication. He said, “I have letters from Paul Newman, Walter Cronkite [and] Gregory Peck. I have them framed. I put them in the house. If it were a text, it would feel different. Maybe that’s a generational thing, and maybe it won’t be that way 20 years from now. But for me, somebody sat down and wrote it.”

Judging by interviews George has conducted over the years, it appears that he really loves letter writing. In December 2020 he told Stephen Colbert, “The phone is great, and it’s terrific you can get a text from somebody that says ‘good to see ya.’ But there’s something about holding a piece of paper in your hand.”

In fact, George has used letters to make statements before – albeit ones of anger rather than romance. Back in 2002 he reportedly penned a cross message to The Washington Post after it suggested that his directorial debut had actually been directed by Steven Soderbergh. At the end of it, he wrote, “Letter actually written by George Clooney.”

But that’s not all. In 2018 it came out that George and Amal had written a sweet letter to a performer in a theater production they saw. Actress Bethan Nash posted a photo of it, which read, “Amal and I wanted to thank you for a fantastic night of theater. We loved every minute of it. You were all so wonderful. My extended family – half of Beirut – loved it, too. Thank you and have a great run. Love George and Amal.”

So, maybe we now know why George and Amal aren’t on social media. Everything they want to say gets said in letters instead! But that wasn’t even the only adorable thing George shared about his family life during the interview round for The Midnight Sky.

AARP actually pointed out in its piece that George tends to fill his life with more hands-on family oriented activities rather than anything involving social media. The star takes his kids to an Italian lake estate in the summer – he won’t accept film projects that film during that time. And there, George entertains them with outdoor fun.

George does other important parenting tasks, too. He told AARP, “I do a lot of sewing the kids’ clothes. And my wife’s dress that tore a couple of times. I was a bachelor for a long time and didn’t have any money, and you have to learn how to repair things.” George continued, “If we were on an island and you had to pick somebody to help you survive, I would pick me.”

Letters and sewing aside, there’s another vital part of Clooney family life – pranks. George is famous for them, and he revealed a particularly gross one to AARP. The actor said, “Yesterday, I taught Alexander to take a piece of banana, chew it up and then spit it into a napkin. Then stand next to his mom, pretend to blow his nose into it and look down until mama looks at it. Then eat it. It’s just outrageously fun!”

But why is George the silly parent? Well, he claims that he has to be as Amal is so smart and collected. He told the Irish TV presenter Graham Norton in another December 2020 interview, “My wife’s a genius; they’re brilliant kids. It is my job to dumb them down. It is my job to put the actor in them a little bit.”

So, that’s what George has to say about his marriage and family. But how about Amal? She did an intriguing and in-depth interview with Vogue magazine in April 2018. Though George was there too, and he couldn’t help but cut in every now and again to talk about how great his wife was.

Right from the beginning, George said, he knew Amal was something special. The actor told Vogue, “Of course, she was beautiful. But I also thought she was fascinating, and I thought she was brilliant. Her life was incredibly exciting – the clients she was taking on and the superhuman work that she was doing.”

We also learned a few little-known tidbits about George in that interview. Amal revealed that he made sure the twins learned to say “mama” before saying “dada.” And when she first started dating the A-list actor, paparazzi practically threw themselves at the couple. Nevertheless, Amal said that it “felt like the most natural thing in the world” to be with him.

Amal said she believed that kind of love was “the one thing in life that I think is the biggest determinant of happiness, and it’s the thing you have the least control over.” The legal expert went on, “I was 35 when I met him. It wasn’t obvious that it was going to happen for me. And I wasn’t willing or excited about the idea of getting married or having a family in the absence of that.”

George was equally distrusting of marriage before meeting Amal. He had briefly been married once – to the actress Talia Balsam – and he didn’t want to do it again. But, he said, “I started dating Amal, and I immediately knew that something was very different.” While holidaying in Africa, he observed some friendly giraffes walk up to her and knew he wanted to propose. Now, a painting of a giraffe reportedly hangs in their house!

The home is also decorated with other reminders of the Amal-George romance, according to Vogue. A sculpture which reads “G and A” sits in one room, and their robes are monogrammed with the same initials. But one of the most important things in the house is actually a circular table – designed so the whole family can have conversations.

Clooney told The Sunday Times in January 2021, “There’s nothing more fun than sitting with my kids in the morning, all of us singing in Italian while we make breakfast for them. I added a slice of that, of the happy moments we have, to [The Midnight Sky] because those moments are very precious to me and I think that they’re beautiful.”

The letters George and Amal send to each other demonstrate what the keystone of their marriage is: good communication and conversation. At the end of The Sunday Times interview, George said, “… It’s been just the two of us for dinner each night, and we never run out of things to talk about.” Yep, that’s how you keep a romance alive!