George Clooney on What Donald Trump Was Like Before Launching 2016 Campaign: 'He Was Just This Knucklehead'

Clooney, a longtime critic of Trump's, also said he believes the former president will "continue to be a factor" in politics

George Clooney attends the Premiere of "The Tender Bar" during the 65th BFI London Film Festival at The Royal Festival Hall on October 10, 2021 in London, England.
Photo: David M. Benett/Dave Benett/WireImage

Before he was president, when he was a reality TV star and New York fixture, Donald Trump was "just a guy who was chasing girls," according to George Clooney, who spoke about Trump in a new interview on the BBC's The Andrew Marr Show.

"It's so funny because he was just this knucklehead," the 60-year-old actor and filmmaker said of Trump, 75. "I knew him before he was a president. He was just a guy who was chasing girls. Every time you went out, he'd come over and be like, 'What's the name of that girl?' That's all he was."

Clooney, who has become a vocal critic of Trump's since the latter's political turn, said that Trump's fans — "this whole group of people that ... think he's the champion" — are people the former president "certainly can't stand" in real life.

Still, the actor said in the interview that he thinks Trump will remain "a factor for a while."

"He's going to play this out for a while, and we'll see where we go with it as a country," Clooney said. "My hope is we have a little better sense than to do that again."

The actor, who is currently promoting his upcoming film The Tender Bar (out Dec. 17) also spoke about Trump's successor, saying he feels Joe Biden needs to repair the fractures left behind by the former president.

"It's like taking a battered child and thinking everything's going to be okay on his first day of school," Clooney said. "There's a lot of things that have to be repaired."

Donald Trump
Donald Trump. James Devaney/GC Images

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Clooney has been politically active throughout his career and he has been detractor of Trump's, whose name he said in January would "forever be associated with insurrection."

The Jan. 6 Capitol riots, Clooney said on an episode of KCRW's The Business podcast, "puts Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka, all of them, into the dustbin of history."

Clooney added then that the events leading up to the riots were "also a tremendous overreach in a way — everybody kept waiting for, what's the one thing, the straw that breaks the camel's back and it just seemed like that line just kept getting moved and moved and moved and outrage didn't even matter anymore, even to the point of calling the secretary of state in Georgia and pressuring him. None of that seemed to matter. This mattered."

Still, the actor told the BBC in the new interview he has no plans of his own to seek political office, telling Marr: "I actually would like to have a nice life."

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