Before the fame: George Clooney’s “shocking” job you won’t believe he did before Hollywood came calling
George Clooney may be worth hundreds of millions today, but he struggled to get make ends meet in the early years of his career.
Hollywood star George Clooney has regularly talked about the menial employment he had to take on before he made it as an actor - and has singled out one particular job he did as “a shocking thing”.
“That’s a tough job”
“I grew up doing some really crappy jobs over the years,” Clooney told NBC’s Brian Williams in 2012. “I sold ladies’ shoes - that’s a tough job. I know it doesn’t sound tough, but women are crazy with their feet.”
Speaking to The Howard Stern Show in 2020, the 64-year-old added: “Let me just say: It’s a shocking thing, selling women’s shoes. It’s shocking.
“First of all, all women lie about the size of their foot. I don’t know why. This [shoe] is a [size] seven, and you go, ‘This [foot] is a ten!’ You’re trying to jam this ten into a seven.”
“I was sleeping on the floor”
Now a two-time Oscar winner worth a reported $500 million, Clooney told Stern he was flat “broke” in the years immediately after he moved to Los Angeles, as a 21-year-old aspiring actor in the early 1980s.
“I was sleeping on the floor of a closet and I didn’t have a car,” recalled Clooney, who began appearing in minor screen parts in the mid-80s, before earning his breakthrough in the medical drama ER in 1994.
“I rode a bicycle all around Hollywood for auditions. And I did construction work and a lot of other jobs to get by.”
“Fuck you!” - Clooney slams “man of the people” Trump
In an interview with the Daily Beast in 2017, Clooney also referenced the struggles of his early working life as he hit back at Donald Trump, a figure who has regularly taken aim at the “elite” in “liberal Hollywood”.
Asked about the U.S. president’s efforts to promote “a culture war between ‘coastal elites’ and Middle America”, Clooney pointed to the apparent irony of Trump, a New York real estate mogul, styling himself as a “man of the people”.
“Here’s the thing: I grew up in Kentucky,” Clooney said. “I sold insurance door-to-door. I sold ladies’ shoes. I worked at an all-night liquor store.
“I would buy suits that were too big and too long and cut the bottom of the pants off to make ties so I’d have a tie to go on job interviews. I grew up understanding what it was like to not have health insurance for eight years.
“So this idea that I’m somehow the ‘Hollywood elite’ and this guy who takes a shit in a gold toilet is somehow the man of the people is laughable.”
Clooney added: “I just look at it and laugh when I see him say ‘Hollywood elite.’ Hollywood elite? I don’t have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, Donald Trump has a star on Hollywood Boulevard! Fuck you!”
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