The role George Clooney admits was “crappy”
The mid-1990s was the single most important period in the career of George Clooney, with the actor trying to prove himself worthy of cinematic superstardom after rising to worldwide fame through his role as Dr Doug Ross in the first five seasons of the hit medical drama E.R.
At the time, there was a distinct difference between a television and a film actor, and plenty of names failed to make that transition with any notable degree of success. Clooney got there eventually, but there was one sizeable bump in the road he had to overcome.
The year after Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn and Michael Hoffman’s One Fine Day showed that Clooney was equally capable of playing a charismatically unscrupulous thief as he was anchoring a romantic comedy. In theory, at least, 1997 was the most important year of his on-screen career to date.
Being cast as the title hero in Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin should have elevated him into the big time, but instead, it left Clooney feeling as though his shot at silver screen success had slipped through his fingers. And yet, despite developing a reputation for trashing the ill-judged comic book adaptation any chance he gets, the actor was happy to welcome another dud that arrived a decade previously into the club.
“As an actor, all bets are off if you need money,” he said in a Newsweek roundtable. “I’ve done really crappy movies or crappy jobs when I was broke, and people go, ‘Why did you do Return of the Killer Tomatoes?’ Because I got the job!”
Three of Clooney’s first four film credits came in terrible bargain basement horrors, with his debut in Grizzly II: Revenge being swiftly followed by Return to Horror High and the aforementioned Return of the Killer Tomatoes, all of which gained a new lease of life when Clooney became an A-lister. The trio of terrible shlockers were suddenly rebranded with his face plastered all over the front.
In the case of Grizzly II, production finished in 1983, but the movie wouldn’t be released in an official capacity until 2021, long after it gained notoriety as an underground favourite. Bootleg copies had been circulating on the internet for years. Still, a wily distributor soon realised that an awful animal attack adventure boasting a fresh-faced Clooney alongside Laura Dern and Charlie Sheen – not to mention Academy Award winner Louise Fletcher, John Rhys-Davies and Timothy Spall – had the potential to be lucrative.
Batman & Robin might be the title Clooney talks about the most when lambasting his own filmography. However, Return of the Killer Tomatoes is well worth remembering as another of his faltering forays into silver-screen stardom, even if he was a complete unknown at the time.