George Clooney opens up about raising kids away from L.A. and why France felt right

George Clooney knows the best and the worst of both worlds. According to Forbes, he’s the sixth-wealthiest actor on the planet, with a fortune of about $480 million, and in 2024 alone he added more than $33 million to his bank account. He knows what wine is served in a Los Angeles penthouse and what color the Californian moon turns over Beverly Hills. Yet he’s also the opposite of all that – and perhaps that’s why he finally grew tired of the glare and glamour of celebrity life and headed for the Old Continent.

“When Clooney was eighteen, he cut tobacco for three dollars an hour. He’s sold insurance door-to-door, and he slept on a closet floor while he was going on acting auditions.” That’s how Esquire frames the arc of his life in a new interview in which he describes choosing to “start over” with his family in Europe.

Clooney: “They have a much better life”

“Yes, we’re very lucky. You know, we live on a farm in France. A good portion of my life growing up was on a farm, and as a kid I hated the whole idea of it. But now, for them, it’s like—they’re not on their iPads, you know? They have dinner with grown-ups and have to take their dishes in. They have a much better life. I was worried about raising our kids in L. A., in the culture of Hollywood. I felt like they were never going to get a fair shake at life. France—they kind of don’t give a shit about fame. I don’t want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don’t want them being compared to somebody else’s famous kids.”

What he calls a “farm” is hardly modest. In Brignoles, the family’s property stretches across 172 hectares of olive trees, woodland, lavender fields and a lake, centered on an eighteenth-century mansion of roughly 10,000 square feet, with a pool and a tennis court. Clooney may have distanced himself from America’s modern pomp, but his retreat still exudes a kind of classic European grandeur.

He also leans into the hands-on life he wants his children to see. “And at first they’re taking these little, tiny brushstrokes, boop, boop, boop,” he says of a spring fence-painting job. “And I go, Nooo, paint the goddamn fence. And then they go crazy painting the fence and they’re covered with paint and oil and stuff.” The point, he says, was that they did the job.

For all the comforts, perspective still guides him. “I’m sixty-four,” he notes, more than once in the interview, laughing at the humbling parts of aging and parenting. It’s a life lived deliberately – swapping Californian moonlight for lavender dawns and the quiet ritual of dinner at a long table instead of the clamor of premieres.

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