George Clooney Did a Truly Bizarre Thing With His ‘Midnight Sky’ Beard After Shaving It
George Clooney directed and starred in The Midnight Sky, but that wasn’t the extent of his commitment to the film. The actor grew out a scraggly beard for the film—a beard that his wife, Amal Clooney, wasn’t too keen of.
Despite how Amal felt about his facial hair, the actor was into it. So much so, he went to great lengths to preserve it after shaving it off.
It took George Clooney months to grow his ‘Midnight Sky’ beard
The 59-year-old star revealed in a recent interview that he grew his beard out for four months in preparation for the role of Augustine, a man strapped with the task of warning astronauts coming to Earth that the planet is no longer inhabitable.
Clooney told Yahoo! Entertainment that his beard was not a hit with his wife and daughter.
“My wife was really, really ready for it to come off,” he said. “My daughter was ready for it to come off. My son loved it. Because he would hide things in it, like a toy car. Literally I’d get to work [and pull things out of my beard]. Like a popsicle stick in my beard.”
George Clooney grossed out his ‘Midnight Sky’ co-stars with his beard
His co-stars weren’t fans of the beard because of what the director decided to do with it after he shaved: He had the beard shavings strung up in the makeup trailer on set.
“It was horrifying,” co-star Kyle Chandler joked to Yahoo! The outlet noted that Felicity Jones seemed grossed out by the preserved clippings.
Clooney clearly has a laissez faire attitude about his hair. He’s pretty low maintenance when it comes to his look. Case in point: he’s cut his own hair with a Flowbee for years. The product comes straight from a decades-old infomercial and is a vacuum-like device that the actor swears by.
The star had returned to his usual facial hair-free look once the film wrapped in February 2020. Once the coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown started, Clooney spent many of the quarantined months editing the film. And he said that working on this particular story this year, of all years, changed the entire experience. It was also his first role in four years—he’s been busy working with Amal on the the Clooney Foundation for Justice and raising his two kids.
“I was working on other things,” he said of his four-year break from movies. “Amal and I have a foundation that I work on, we try to chase down war criminals and that kind of thing. I also have twins, quite honestly. I’ve been spending a lot of time with them.”
“And it takes a while to get things done,” he continued. “I’ve been working, but I haven’t been acting so much. But this was also a really good part for me.”
The beard was just an added bonus.
