But before he settled down, he squeezed in one more outrageous, if generous, caper when he visited a warehouse in an undisclosed location to pick up $14 million in cash to surprise his 14 closest friends with.
Clooney sets the scene in his interview. He was appearing in “Gravity,” a thriller set in space costarring Sandra Bullock. The film wasn’t expected to be a hit when it was released in 2013, so Clooney said he was given “percentages of the movie” in lieu of a salary.
The astronaut thriller ended up being a hit anyway, so Clooney walked away with a few million dollars. He didn’t have a family then, and he wasn’t yet married. So, instead of saving it, he opted to give it away — in cash — to his closest friends.
“And I thought, you know, without them I don’t have any of this,” he said of his friends. “And we’re all really close, and I just thought, basically, if I get hit by a bus, they’re all in the will. So why the f**k am I waiting to get hit by a bus?”
As Clooney tells GQ’s Zach Baron, he drove an old van to a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles where “they have giant pallets of cash,” filled luggage with $14 million worth and called his friends over to his home.
“And I just held up a map and I just pointed to all the places I got to go in the world and all the things I’ve gotten to see because of them,” he told GQ. “And I said, ‘How do you repay people like that?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well: How about a million bucks?'”
The interview appears in GQ’s December/January issue.