George Clooney loves an old-fashioned romance. During an interview with AARP, he revealed one tradition in particular of which he's particularly fond: writing letters to his wife, Amal Clooney.
"Even
in lockdown, I'll write a letter and slip it on her desk, or she'll write a letter and leave it under the pillow," he said."I'm a big believer in letters. I have letters from Paul Newman, Walter Cronkite, Gregory Peck. I have them framed. I put them in the house. If it were a text, it would feel different. Maybe that's a generational thing, and maybe it won't be that way 20 years from now, but for me, somebody sat down and wrote it."
Clooney told the publication that both he and his wife love a good handwritten letter and have even taken to writing them to their twins, Ella and Alexander, who will turn 4 this year. Every year, the Clooneys go away for a weekend—just the two of them—and leave their kids behind. But before they take off, they always write each child a letter with the date on it.
Ella and Alexander were born in June of 2017, the month following their dad's 56th birthday. He candidly spoke to AARP about being an older father (and why he chose traditional names for his children): "I didn't want, like, weird-ass names for our kids," he said. "They're already going to have enough trouble. It's hard being the son of somebody famous and successful. Paul Newman's son killed himself. Gregory Peck's son killed himself. Bing Crosby had two sons kill themselves. I have an advantage because I'm so much older that by the time my son would feel competitive, I'll literally be gumming bread."
In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning in November, Clooney revealed that he and his wife hadn't always talked about wanting kids. He added that before their wedding in 2014, marriage hadn't been an ongoing conversation for them either.
"We never talked about having kids, and then one day we just said, 'What do you think?,' " he said."We go to the doctor and you do the ultrasound. They're like, 'You got a baby boy!' and I was like, 'Baby boy, fantastic!' And they go, 'And you got another one there.' I was up for one. Again, I'm old. All of a sudden, it's two. It's hard to get me to not talk and I just stood there for like 10 minutes just staring at this piece of paper going, 'What? Two?" He continued, later: "There is no question that having Amal in my life changed everything for me," he said. "It was the first time that everything that she did and everything about her was infinitely more important than anything about me. And then we had these two knuckleheads. It is very fulfilling and something I wasn't at all...I didn't see coming."