Apart from spending time with his wife, Amal Clooney, their three-year-old twins and a St. Bernard puppy that occasionally interrupts his train of thought, Clooney has occupied himself during lockdown by finishing his seventh film as a director, The Midnight Sky, an adaptation by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) of Lily Brooks-Dalton's 2016 novel Good Morning, Midnight, which Netflix will begin streaming on Dec. 23.
Clooney also stars in the post-apocalyptic film, although you would be forgiven for not recognizing him. Indeed, People's two-time Sexiest Man Alive looks nothing like himself, having dropped a significant amount of weight, grown a bushy grey beard and assumed a hunched posture in order to play Augustine, a dying scientist who winds up caring for a young child while racing to try to deter astronauts from returning to an Earth that is no longer habitable by mankind.
"It's a story about trying to communicate and trying to be in touch with one another," Clooney says. "When I read the script I thought, 'Well, this is an issue we have in general because of how polarized we are as a world and how we're having such trouble contacting one another.' And then, when a pandemic hits, it actually is physically impossible to contact one another, to be in each other's space, and everybody is just trying to get home. And so, unfortunately, it's timely."
The Academy Award winner's seventh film as a director, which drops Dec. 23, stars him as a dying scientist caring for a young child while racing to save mankind.