George Clooney Is a Little Nervous About His Broadway Debut

The TV news business is both an inheritance and a lifelong fascination for George Clooney: His father, Nick, was a journalist and TV host, and he co-wrote and directed the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck., about CBS anchor Edward R. Murrow’s face-off with Joseph McCarthy. Now, nearly two decades later, Clooney is revisiting the subject on Broadway. “It seemed like a good time to remind ourselves how important journalism is to all of us and what a terrible state the country would be in without the Fourth Estate,” Clooney told me in early February. “Also, I think it’s a nice time to remind ourselves of us at our best—when we stood up to power and people did something very brave and unselfish.”

Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov originally imagined the film, written in response to condemnation Clooney himself received for criticizing the Iraq War, as a live-TV production. (That idea went out the window, according to Clooney, when CBS execs told him they were no longer interested in the risk of live television the morning after the Justin Timberlake–Janet Jackson incident at the Super Bowl.) So it’s fitting, perhaps, that this movie in particular might make its way to the stage. The parameters of the thing are, so to speak, theater-friendly: The film, a taut 90 minutes, largely stays within the CBS offices as Murrow and his crew report out McCarthy’s attacks on supposed Communists in the U.S. government, in the midst of also doing fluffier celebrity interviews with the likes of Liberace. An adaptation with a separate creative team was announced at Steppenwolf Theatre for a run in 2020, then scuttled owing to the pandemic. After that, Clooney and Heslov decided to step in and try their hands at adapting it themselves. “We’d written it with the idea of being able to do it almost as a stage play because of the live-television idea,” Clooney said. “So we went back to that [version], which meant some of the story is different; some of the ways we tell it is different. The play is now bigger than the film, which almost never happens. It expands on what we were working on in the claustrophobia of the CBS newsroom.”

Their version of Good Night, and Good Luck. is currently in rehearsals for previews starting on March 12, helmed by David Cromer, a director who has made a name for himself with intimate dramas and musicals, like The Band’s Visit and a famed Off Broadway version of Our Town. In this production, he’s working on a large scale, with a supporting cast of more than a dozen theatrical and television names, in the Winter Garden, one of Broadway’s largest theaters. He’s also using live recording onstage to re-create those famous interviews—as in the film, McCarthy appears only via archival footage. “They’re putting cameras inside of these prop cameras to film what you’re going to see on the projected screens in the play,” said Ilana Glazer, who plays Shirley Wershba, a crucial member of the CBS team. “Not only is it cool to see how the sausage was made, but you also get the rhythm of the team, this group of people who were in a special moment together.” Clooney has also helped the cast master the equipment of the era. “George showed us how to run and steer the TV cameras because he grew up in his father’s TV station,” said Cromer. “We had had tutorials, but he went, ‘Oh, wait—here’s this. This is what that lever does. Here’s how you crank this.’ ”

This production of Good Night, and Good Luck. was announced last spring. It’s arriving now, during the Trump administration, which has immediately gone after the press, including a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News and Paramount over standard interview-editing practices. (CBS’s parent company Paramount reportedly may settle that suit, its own kind of McCarthy-era compliance in advance.) Clooney and Heslov aren’t implementing any rewrites in response to current events—that’s not necessary, Cromer told me—but they are hyperaware of the context in which the audience will arrive to see a play about attacks on free speech. Their hope, however, is to provide the context for how these attacks have played out, and been resisted, in the past. “This is not something new,” Clooney said, adding that it’s often useful to look at a current crisis through a previous one, as Arthur Miller did during the House Unamerican Activities Committee era through the prism of The Crucible. “Oftentimes we think that whatever happens most recently is the worst that it’s ever been. People talk about where we are in the world, and you go, Well, we’ve certainly had much more challenging times in our country’s history. It just doesn’t feel that way now because we’re all sitting in it.”

When Good Night, and Good Luck. does start performances, it will also mark Clooney’s return to the theater for the first time in 39 years. His last stage performance was back when he was 24, years before his breakout run on ER, in a small play called Vicious, in which he played a sex worker and drug dealer who was also the comic relief. Now, he’s taking on the lead role—in the film, David Strathairn played Murrow, while Clooney played his collaborator Fred Friendly—and bracing himself for the challenge. “There’s all this panic,” Clooney said, not least in terms of figuring out how to deliver Murrow’s stirring speeches to his audience, famous enough in themselves that discerning theatergoers might notice if you got any words wrong. “The first couple of times I did those speeches, David Cromer was like, ‘Yeah, you got the words right, but that’s about all you did,’ ” Clooney said. “And there’s a part of you that goes, Well, at least I got the words right. I’m thrilled—I got the words. And now we’ll work on the rest of it.”

In previews March 12 at the Winter Garden Theatre.