Oscar winner George Clooney is describing how he fell in love with his wife, international human-rights attorney Amal Alamuddin Clooney, and how they discussed having their children, 4-year-old twins Ella and Alexander.
“Listen, I didn’t want to get married, I didn’t want to have kids. And then this extraordinary human being walked into my life and I just, I fell madly in love,” Clooney, 60, said on Monday’s edition of the podcast “WTF with Marc Maron.” “And I knew from the minute I met her that everything was going to be different.”
Falling in love with her, he said a few minutes later in the podcast, was like “nothing I’d ever experienced before. … Literally the first moment I met her I thought, ‘Well this is the most extraordinary, smart, brilliant, beautiful woman I’ve ever met,’ and then I thought, ‘Why can’t I find somebody like that?’ “
He added they had “just met as friends and then a few months later I was in London doing a score for a movie and I brought her over to Abbey Road [Studios]. She came from a meeting at the Muslim Brotherhood — she was trying to solve a problem there. And I brought her to Abbey Road where there’s a huge 150-piece orchestra. I thought if you can’t impress anybody here then you can’t impress anybody.”
When Maron reminded Clooney of the actor-filmmaker’s playboy past, the star answered, “Hey, listen, I went out with a lot of really nice, smart, talented people. It’s just, y’know, every once in a while there’s somebody that’s specifically for you, and I feel like Amal and I feel that way.”
Clooney and his wife, who married in September 2014, later specifically discussed having children.
“So we’d been married for about a year and we were at a friend’s house, and they had a kid there, which was loud and obnoxious,” he recalled. From that disconcerting inspiration, he and Alamuddin Clooney, 43, “went outside for a walk. And Amal said … ‘So we’re awfully lucky in life.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we are. We’re lucky we found each other, yes.’ And she said, ‘Seems like that luck should be shared with some other folks.’ “
Clooney said he “thought about it for, I dunno, maybe a minute” as the two sat in silence. “I don’t think either of us had made a decision. And then I just said, ‘Well, I’m in if you’re in’, and she said, ‘I think we should try.’ … I have to say it was very emotional because I really was convinced that that wasn’t my lot in life and was comfortable with that.”
And then relating stories of his children’s cuteness, he assured, “I love it now. … And thank God they have each other — during the pandemic they were together.”
