“The phone is great, and it’s terrific you can get a text from somebody that says ‘good to see ya,’ but there’s something about holding a piece of paper in your hand.”
And with that, George Clooney made his case for old fashioned letter-writing as a virtuous form of communication. (He did not divulge if his a typewriter fanatic like Tom Hanks, or preferred to stick to the ol’ quill.)
Clooney appeared on Friday night’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert, to promote his forthcoming Netflix sci fi film The Midnight Sky. While host and guest were chatting across the Atlantic (Clooney is currently in England) they got on the topic of letters.
Turns out Clooney has a collection from “those guys” who “you want them to be who you imagine them to be, and they were.” This list includes actors Gregory Peck and Paul Newman, plus the Most Trusted Man in America, Walter Cronkite.
He joked that he and Newman had a great friendship, and after the absolute flop of his football comedy Leatherheads, the Oscar-winning star known for race car driving superimposed the film’s poster with an image of a vehicle he’d recently wrecked. The caption read “happens to all of us, pal.”
The Cronkite letter recalled a moment in 2000 when Clooney, who produced and co-starred in a live broadcast of the Cold War military thriller Fail Safe, enlisted Cronkite to voice an introduction. He figured it would be a cinch, as he’d done live newscasts for years, but the elder statesman did, in fact, bungle the intro a little. While the story centers around the two superpowers threatening to drop atomic bombs on one another, it was Cronkite who, afterwards, dropped an F-bomb, privately.
“Sorry I ____ed up, George,” Clooney said, mimicking the anchor’s great baritone.
While he didn’t get into the specifics of his relationship with Gregory Peck, it’s notable that the late star’s grandson, Ethan Peck plays the younger version of Clooney during flashbacks in The Midnight Sky.
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