George Clooney has lashed out at Quentin Tarantino for alleged past comments that disputed his status as a bona fide Hollywood movie star.
The 63-year-old movie veteran was participating in a joint cover story for GQ along with his longtime friend and co-star Brad Pitt ahead of the release of their new film Wolfs when he gave his frank views of Hollywood movie stars.
As Variety magazine notes, Clooney took aim at Quentin Tarantino, who directed Pitt to an Oscar in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and allegedly shaded Clooney recently by claiming he is still not movie star status.
Clooney and Tarantino shared the screen together in 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn. Clooney said:
Quentin said some shit about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him. He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about [Brad], and somebody else, and then this guy goes, ‘Well, what about George?’ He goes, he’s not a movie star. And then he literally said something like, ‘Name me a movie since the millennium.’ And I was like, ‘Since the millennium? That’s kind of my whole fucking career.’
So now I’m like, all right, dude, fuck off. I don’t mind giving him shit.
The pair then went on to agree Hollywood does not crank out movie stars the way it used to when they were rising through the ranks.
“Well, they haven’t developed stars the way the studio system used to,” Clooney said about Hollywood’s paucity of major stars.
File/American actors George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino on the set of From Dusk Till Dawn, directed and produced by Robert Rodriguez. (Dimension Films/Miramax/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
“We kind of were at the very end of that, where you could work at a studio and do three or four films, and there was some plan to it. And I don’t think that’s necessarily the case anymore. So it’s harder for you to sell somebody something on the back of a star.”