- George Clooney celebrated his 60th birthday earlier this year—but he’s not exactly thrilled about it.
- “Turning 60 is a bummer. But it’s that or dead,” The Tender Bar director said this week. “I feel good. But in 20 years I’m 80—and 80 is a real number.”
- Clooney also revealed his thoughts on aging and spending time with Amal and their twins during the pandemic.
Although most of us would argue that George Clooney only gets better with age, at least one person disagrees: the actor himself. In a revealing new interview, Clooney, who celebrated his 60th birthday earlier this year, got candid about aging.
“Turning 60 is a bummer. But it’s that or dead,” The Tender Bar director told The Sunday Times this week. To celebrate the milestone, he and wife Amal, 43, held an intimate, “emotional” party with friends in California—one that shed new light on his future.
“I said to Amal, ‘Knock on wood, I’m healthy,’” Clooney, the father of 4-year-old twins Ella and Alexander, continued. “I still play basketball with the younger gang. I feel good. But in 20 years I’m 80—and 80 is a real number.”
The silver fox isn’t too hung up on his age, though. “I said the next 20 years are halcyon and we need to celebrate that; we should focus on the work we do being just the stuff we have to, that we feel in our chest,” he recalled. “We have young kids ... I want to be able to live all of this.”
This isn’t the first time Clooney has reflected on what it means to get older. “I always say to my dad, ‘I'm middle-aged.’ And he goes, ‘You know a lot of 120-year-olds?’” the Ocean’s Eleven star told AARP last year. “[Turning] 70 will be more of a shot to the throat ... I’m telling you, 70 will f--k me up.”
“I’m not a particularly religious guy, so I have to be skeptical about an afterlife. But as you get older, you start thinking, ‘Well, wait a minute.’ It’s very hard for me to say, ‘Once you’re finished with this chassis that we’re in, you’re just done,’” Clooney continued. “My version of it is that you’re taking that one one-hundredth of a pound of energy that disappears when you die and you’re jamming it right into the hearts of all the other people you’ve been close to.”
But for now, Clooney is focused on his present—life as a dad and husband. “I just look at them thinking I couldn’t be happier, and I couldn’t be more surprised at how happy I am,” he said on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron earlier this month. “The hard part is being 60 and just the sheer running around of it.”
Although Clooney isn’t exactly thrilled to be aging, he’s clearly got the right attitude about the process—and just like the rest of us, he’s still got plenty to look forward to. We can't wait to see what the next decade brings for him and his family!
Jake Smith, an editorial fellow at Prevention, recently graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in magazine journalism and just started going to the gym. Let's be honest—he's probably scrolling through Twitter right now.
