Gerrad Hall is an editorial director at Entertainment Weekly, overseeing movie, awards, and music coverage. He is also host of The Awardist podcast, and has cohosted EW’s live Oscars, Emmys, SAG, and Grammys red carpet shows. He has appeared on Good Morning America, The Talk, Access Hollywood, Extra!, and other talk shows, delivering the latest news on pop culture and entertainment.
For his 13th feature film, Noah Baumbach was ready for an adventure, one that got him and his characters outside of his mostly New York- and Los Angeles-set movies.
“I have wanted to shoot in Europe for a long time. I wanted to shoot in Tuscany because it felt right for the story,” Baumbach tells Entertainment Weekly of Jay Kelly, streaming now on Netflix. “The story starts in Los Angeles with this notion – and it’s not obviously the case for everybody – but it is a culture that helps support the illusion that you’re never gonna die. Take that, start there, and then go to a place in Italy where the first location is a graveyard and there are signs of mortality everywhere. That worked for this story.”
This story revolves around the title character, a world-famous actor played by, well, world-famous actor George Clooney, who’s just finished his latest movie. When his longtime mentor, producer Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), suddenly dies, Jay starts to face his own mortality. He wants to be with those who matter most to him, those who’ve taken a back seat to his career. But when he tries to get some quality time with his youngest daughter (Grace Edwards), she doesn’t have time for him; she’s taking off to Europe with her friends. Suddenly, that lifetime achievement award offer from an Italian film festival that he just told his team (Adam Sandler, Laura Dern) to turn down now sounds like a good reason for him to quietly follow his daughter to Europe.
Baumbach — whose movies include Marriage Story, Mistress America, Frances Ha, Greenberg, and The Squid and the Whale — says over the years he’s had “lots of loose ideas” of the bigger picture — “an actor having a crisis” and “maybe an actor on a train” and Tuscany — but he didn’t know what it all meant until actress Emily Mortimer, a co-writer here in addition to costarring as Jay’s hairstylist, helped him “give it shape and allowed it to become the movie that it became,” he says.
“For whatever reason, there are things that I carry with me that I know at some point will find their way into a movie, but I don’t feel ready to do it or know how I’m gonna do it. And then they announce themselves in some way, and this one started to announce itself,” he explains. “Marriage Story was the same way. I felt like, I don’t want to do this yet. Maybe it’s similar to an actor who wants to play King Lear, but they can’t do that at 35. So I think something else comes [into my life] that gives it meaning or defines it in a way that it maybe wasn’t defined.”
While Jay Kelly ultimately has some similarities with Clooney, like being from Kentucky — “I wanted George to be able to play it in a way that was close to him,” Baumbach explains — that was added later, after the actor officially joined the project. Baumbach, however, wasn’t writing for Clooney. But there was no way around it: A movie star would be playing this movie star. And with that, there would be this “implicit notion of what a movie star does for us, this point of identification that we have with these people that is both the pleasure of watching them play different characters, but in different movies, different genres, but also this familiarity that we want from them at the same time,” he says. “It’s a complex thing, and it’s very hard to talk about. It’s very hard to define.”
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
Clooney, he knew, would bring his own thing. “George has a kind of timelessness, which is so interesting about him. He feels like he could be a movie star in any era. What I loved watching with him was, he’s so funny and charming, and that’s part of what Jay Kelly is as well, but because this story also has this kind of undertow and these memories and this other thing that’s going on at the same time, watching him reveal more and more of himself — and I don’t mean himself as the iconography of George Clooney, but some other real vulnerability — I thought was fascinating.”
It’s the final moments of the film that he finds the most compelling, when Clooney’s “kind of afraid, and something almost becomes transparent about him, to see an American movie star play, first of all, their own age, while giving us all the pleasures of what we want from it,” he recalls, “to then an openness and humanity, I think it was real. It was exciting to be there with him when we shot those scenes.”
Read more on Entertainment Weekly
