President Joe Biden celebrated George Clooney at the 2022 Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, but not without cracking a joke about the actor’s marriage to wife Amal Clooney.
The Oscar winner was honoured by the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on 4 December for his lifetime achievements in acting, directing, producing and his work as a human rights activist.
Prior to the ceremony, President Joe Biden hosted the honorees at the White House where he poked fun at the Ocean’s Eleven star’s marriage to human rights lawyer, Amal Clooney.
“Tonight, we celebrate a truly exceptional…group of artists who embody the very spirit of ‘We the People,’” the 80-year-old president said in his speech.
“At this year’s Kennedy Center honorees, they’re an incredible group of people. In ‘We the People,’ we see character. We see Amal Clooney’s husband,” he said, as the room broke into laughter.
The president went on to list Clooney’s achievements, praising the father of two for his “deep empathy” and human rights work in “warzones to end genocides and war crimes”.
“He knows the work remains unfinished, yet he is unrelenting and undaunted,” Biden concluded. “That’s character in real life, and that’s George Clooney.”
Ahead of the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in Washington DC, Clooney was photographed fixing Amal’s dress on the red carpet. When his wife’s crimson dress had become tangled at the back, her doting husband crouched down behind her and unfolded the train as Amal smiled for pictures.
Although George Clooney is a celebrated actor, his wife is a world-renowned human rights lawyer who has represented a number of victims of mass atrocities, including genocide and sexual violence. But this is not the first time Amal’s career has been compared to her husband’s. Back in 2015, comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poelher told a similar joke about the couple during their opening monologue at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards, where George was receiving a lifetime achievement award.
“George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year,” remarked Fey during the monologue. “Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an advisor to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected for a three-person commission investigating rules of war violation in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.”
George Clooney, 61, and Amal, 44, were married during a lavish ceremony in Venice, Italy in 2014. Now, the couple are parents to five-year-old twins Alexander and Ella.
Throughout the past eight years, the Ticket to Paradise star has often gushed over his wife’s major achievements as well. In September, George spoke highly of the Lebanese-British lawyer’s passion for helping free journalists who have been wrongly accused and detained.
In his speech given at the New York Public Library during the inaugural Albie Awards, George revealed what he loved most about creating the event together, through their Clooney Foundation for Justice.
“We collaborate on everything. We collaborated on twins!” George said. “But you know, this is an exciting one because Amal’s gotten journalists out of Egypt, out of Azerbaijan, prisons, out of all over the world, Myanmar.”
“My father’s a journalist. I have a great affinity for them. Her mother’s a journalist. So it’s really exciting for me when she’s able to get people who are wrongly accused for doing their job [out of prison],” the actor added. “So for me…I couldn’t be more proud of my wife.”
