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Louise Thomas
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George Clooney has opened up about why he and his wife Amal Clooney haven’t shown off their seven-year-old twins, Alexander and Ella.
In a recently published joint interview with Brad Pitt for GQ, Clooney admitted how important it was for his children to have their privacy and how he’s done his best to keep them out of media headlines.
“A lot of people – even who reach a fairly high level of fame – find a way to be able to kind of live a normal life, walk around the streets of New York without being followed and stuff like that,” the Ocean’s Eleven actor said after he was asked about dealing with his level of fame. “And there’s, I dunno, five or six of us where it’s just never subsided.”
“There’s never been that like, ‘Hey, let’s take a walk through Central Park and not get hammered,’” he said. “It just hasn’t happened yet. It will, obviously. But it hasn’t happened yet.”
Clooney continued, mentioning that his top priority for his children is to avoid photos of them appearing online.
“I have a goal of trying to protect, I don’t want pictures of my kids,” he said. “We deal in very serious subject matters, with very serious bad guys, and we don’t want to have photos of our kids out there. So we have to work hard at trying to stay private, and it’s tricky, as you can imagine.”
Both actors pointed out that they also “avoid going to the hospital with something that you would normally go to the hospital for” out of fear that the trip might generate “headlines.” “It’s absolutely true,” Clooney said. “You will assess how bad something is before you go.”
Elsewhere, in the GQ interview, Pitt touched on his journey to sobriety following his divorce from actor Angelina Jolie. After the split, reports alleged that the pair had been involved in heated arguments in which Pitt was under the influence of alcohol.
“You know they came down on me for that? AA did,” he said. “They were like, ‘It’s anonymous.’...”
Clooney responded, “Really? You got sh** for that?”
Pitt said looking back on the organization warning him about admitting that he attended. “I’m not outing anyone. Everyone knows you exist. What’s the issue?” he said.
In 2022, the star opened up about his involvement with the AA, telling GQ, “I had a really cool men’s group here that was really private and selective, so it was safe.”
He continued, “Because I’d seen things of other people who had been recorded while they were spilling their guts and that’s just atrocious to me.”
Pitt also touched on his decision to become sober in an interview with The New York Times in 2019.
“I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he told the outlet at the time.
The actor also mentioned how much he admired the other people in the group and their openness when speaking about their experiences.
“You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard,” Pitt said. “It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself.”
