Clooney is officially foxy

Steve Pratt finds the animal in Hollywood A-lister George Clooney as he turns chicken thief in his latest screen role.

GEORGE CLOONEY films are like buses. You wait for one for ages, then three come along at the same time. Gorgeous George – and yes, he really does look sickeningly “suave, debonair and resourceful” as billed – has not one, not two, but three new movies to promote.

He’s in town, London town that is, for the world premiere of animated film Fantastic Mr Fox in which he plays, and you probably don’t need telling, the Mr Fox of the title. Now Clooney is officially foxy.

With two other movies – The Men Who Stare At Goats and Up In The Air – showing during the two-week BFI London Film Festival, he might well be described as Hollywood’s hardest working actor, He rejects the idea. But in a nice way, of course.

He’s never less than polite and courteous.

Even when someone – and this is a multi-national press conference to launch Fantastic Mr Fox – asks, in a roundabout way, whether the singular Clooney is looking to get married and have kids, he knows how to bat it back to the questioner. “That was good, I have to applaud you. Thank you for the question. That was a good question,” he says, playing for time.

“I’m going to adopt some of Brad Pitt’s. I owe him a few. But I don’t have an answer.”

It’s a masterclass in fielding a personal inquiry without offending anyone but, more importantly for him, without actually answering the question. Being George Clooney, it’s difficult not to admire him for it. He’s so charming whatever he does.

He’s actually promoting a film in which he doesn’t even appear. Only his voice is heard in this version of the Roald Dahl story shot in stop motion animation. That hasn’t stopped at least one commentator pleading that, although he doesn’t appear in the flesh, this is Clooney’s best performance. He’s sharing the press conference platform with seven other people – Bill Murray and Jarvis Cocker (who performs a song in the film) among them – but the majority of inquiries are directed towards Clooney as befits a Hollywood A-lister.

When he says, “I just turned up for the pay cheque”, you know he’s joking. He takes his acting seriously, despite the levity with which he deals with the media. He actually recorded his voice role several years ago, it was director Wes Anderson who has been toiling away making the film.

“A chance to work on an interesting story and with Wes,” he says, nodding towards Anderson – who made Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited – sitting beside him.

THE story sees Mr Fox’s wild animal instincts coming to the fore after years of domesticity with Mrs Fox (Meryl Streep), their son Ash, (Jason Schwartzman), and visiting young nephew (Eric Anderson). He returns to his old chicken thieving ways, endangering the animal community in the process.

So, George, did playing a father and having a son make you broody? The word “broody”

has to be explained to him. It’s a good delaying tactic while he thinks of an answer that does not give anything away about his private life.

He ends up saying that just having the younger Swartzman next to him feels like having a son.

He’s also generous enough to own up to the fact that voicing Mr Fox wasn’t a particularly onerous task. “We worked for a few days out on a farm together and ran around and played in barns and out in the fields,” he explains. “Wes worked for a year-and-a-half on this project. So in some ways our being up here is really silly.”

The marketing people know otherwise.

Clooney, whether or not he appears on screen, is the big selling point alongside writer Roald Dahl.

But he does appear to have been born to play Mr Fox. What attributes does he share with the character? “I try to wax daily,” he jokes. “We have a similar voice. I seem to be considerably taller than the character.”

Anderson explains how he arrived at Clooney to voice Mr Fox. “Sometimes when I’m writing a script I have an actor in mind. On this one, I was just thinking of animals until the script was done. I thought Cary Grant would have been good. Then, within 20 seconds, I thought of George.”

As producer Allison Abate puts it: “George was born to play this part. He’s the right combination of Cary Grant and Clark Gable. He’s got the debonair, gentlemanly quality of Grant as well as the animalistic, sexy side.” Then she adds, “I really believe he could steal some chickens”, which must be one of the strangest things ever said about a star by a producer.

This isn’t the first time one of his movies has featured in the London Film Festival and he’s pleased to be back. “There’s a level of pride in film here that’s really fine. It’s a great place to bring a movie and find out whether it’s going to hold up, not just for that opening weekend but last longer,” he says.

Then there’s the matter of all the animals speaking with American accents despite the story being set in the English countryside.

Clearly, Clooney has been expecting this question. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to answer it. He’s an actor, not the director. Anderson explains that he and Noah Baumbach, who adapted Dahl’s story, are both American and write American voices better.

So all the animals have American accents and the humans are British. That’s to say, the evil farmers – Boggis, Bunce and Bean – against whom Mr Fox and his animal friends find themselves fighting.

As Ghostbusters star Bill Murray, who plays Mr Fox’s lawyer Badger, tells us, “You guys play the bad guys”. And quite honestly, what chance do we bad Brits have – pitted against the Fantastic Mr Clooney?

■ Fantastic Mr Fox (PG) opens in cinemas on October 23.