Whilst interviewing George Clooney about his latest directorial/acting role in The Ides of March, which sees Hollywood’s most charming actor play a character running for Presidency, Total Film finally got him talking about the 1997 atrocity superhero film Batman and Robin, directed by the once great but truly never the same director Joel Schumacher.

George Clooney (Swoon-y Swoon-y as my mother calls him) revealed that:

“With hindsight it’s easy to look back at this and go ‘Woah, that was really shit and I was really bad in it.

The truth is, my phone rang, and the head of Warner Bros said ‘Come into my office, you are going to play Batman in a Batman film’ and I said ‘Yeah!’ I called my friends and they screamed and I screamed and we couldn’t believe it!

I just thought the last one had been successful so I thought I was just going to be in a big successful franchise movie.

In a weird way I was. Batman is still the biggest break I ever had and it completely changed my career, even if it was weak and I was weak in it. It was a difficult film to be good in. I don’t know what I could have done differently.

But if I am going to be Batman in the film Batman & Robin, I can’t say it didn’t work and then not take some of the blame for that.”

So there we have it folks, even the man behind the mask himself states that the film, that almost single handedly destroyed the reign of the Caped Crusader, was a huge failure. However without it then Mr Swoon-y may not have rose to his current meteoric standing with the film world. It is a Catch 22 situation, though with Clooney making some of the best films year in/year out and Christopher Nolan making Batman a modern day phenomenon, it’s all worked out in the end!

George Clooney’s new film, “The Ideas of March”, opens on the 28th of October.

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