Step aside, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon: another pair of Hollywood leading men are taking center stage in the latest issue of GQ. While discussing their upcoming Apple action-comedy film Wolfs, George Clooney and Brad Pitt reflected on the origins of their decades-long friendship.
“We’ve been friends for a long time,” Clooney told the publication. “And it’s fun because we also check in on each other every once in a while, which is an important part of this. Things get complicated in life and you always have to make sure everybody’s okay.”
Pitt and Clooney have co-starred in films like Ocean’s Eleven and its two sequels, as well as 2008’s Coen brother comedy Burn After Reading. But their onscreen rapport also extends offscreen. “I’ll call George on numerous occasions when things get bumpy,” said Pitt, explaining that as another global celebrity, “George is going to understand something that no one else is going to understand, that we don’t even have to speak about. There’s a comfort in that. There’s another smaller tribe that erupts from that because of the pressures and the struggles that one will have in their own life.”
Speaking of the dark side of fame: it was Clooney’s impassioned 1997 speech following the death of Princess Diana that initially drew Pitt to him. “When George first stood out to me is really when Princess Diana died in the crash, and George got up to speak about it,” Pitt told GQ.
At the time, Clooney spoke before a group of reporters at the Screen Actors Guild office in Los Angeles—and pointed a finger at the press for their role in Diana’s death. “Princess Di is dead, and who should we see about that? The driver of the car? The paparazzi? Or the magazines and papers who purchased these pictures and make bounty hunters out of photographers?” he said. “If you weren’t hiding behind the profession of journalism, you would be an accomplice to a crime, and you would go to jail.”
More than 20 years later, Clooney similarly defended Meghan Markle against media scrutiny. “She’s a woman who is seven months pregnant and she is being pursued and vilified and chased in the same way that Diana was, and it’s history repeating itself,” he said in 2019. “And we’ve seen how that ends.”
In their GQ cover story, Clooney said that he and Pitt have “been in Paris in those same chases” as Diana endured. “It’s a horrible feeling,” Pitt said. “It’s really invasive to know people are out there and they’re hiding in the bushes. It’s really a shitty, shitty feeling,” he continued. “And so George got up and commented on that after Princess Diana. And that’s when I saw: This guy’s got something that the rest of us don’t. Like, I saw the leader in that moment.”