Actor George Clooney (Kentucky, 64 years old) has publicly supported various Democratic presidential campaigns in the United States and is one of the party’s biggest fundraisers, which is why his public letter asking Joe Biden to give up the race for a second term was surprising. Now, with Donald Trump occupying the Oval Office, he has declared on the program Sunday Morningfrom the CBS News network, that it was “a mistake” for Kamala Harris to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate in the 2024 presidential elections. For the actor, who was vice president of the United States, he faced a very complicated position at that time: taking distance and at the same time defending his own performance in the outgoing Administration.
These statements, made last Monday, November 3 on the American network, come more than a year after the letter that Clooney published in The New York Times In July 2024, an opinion text in which he urged Biden – then president of the United States and candidate for re-election – to step aside given his delicate state of health. As the actor has now assured CBS, referring to Harris’s role then: “We had an opportunity. As I wrote in the article, I wanted there to be a primary. We are going to put (the candidates) to the test quickly and get it going. I think the mistake in having Kamala run was that she had to fight against her own record.”
“It’s very difficult to do so if the objective of the candidacy is to say: ‘I’m not like that’. It’s difficult, they imposed a very complicated task on him. Honestly, I think it was a mistake. But they say that if we weren’t going to lose more seats in the House of Representatives, so I don’t know. Not doing it (writing his letter) would have been like saying: ‘I’m not going to tell the truth,’ added the two-time Oscar winner, for films Syria and Argo.
Regarding that opinion article in which he demanded that Biden give up his efforts, Clooney wanted to make it clear during the interview that he does not regret writing it. That text, published days after the highly questioned television debate on June 27, 2024 against Trump, warned that the party would not win with Biden at the helm. “We are not going to win in November with this president. Furthermore, we will not win the House and we are going to lose the Senate. It is not just my opinion, it is the opinion of every senator, congressman and governor with whom I have spoken privately. Each and every one, regardless of what they say in public,” he wrote then. Finally, and after a cascade of internal pressure, Biden withdrew from the electoral race on July 21, 2024 and endorsed Harris, although the Republican finally won the presidential election on November 5, 2024.
In April 2025, the filmmaker also defended on CNN that his decision to write the opinion article was a “civic duty”, even at the cost of his public image: “That’s the way things are, if you believe in something, you have to defend it. Defend your position and face the consequences. Those are the rules, so when they criticize me I have to accept it. I don’t mind being criticized for my position. I defend their right to criticize me as much as I defend my right to criticize them,” he said. However, writing it earned him strong criticism, among others from Hunter Biden, the former president’s son, who went so far as to say that Clooney was “not a fucking actor, but a brand.” On this, he has also now spoken out in Sunday Morning: “I could spend a lot of time denying a lot of the things he said, because a lot of them were just outright lies, (…) but the reality is that I don’t think looking back like that is helpful to anyone, especially him.”
In any case, today Clooney’s life is far from the United States. Earlier this October, he explained to the magazine Esquire that the decision to live on a farm in Brignoles, in the south of France, had a lot to do with being the father of twins, for whom he believes this is an ideal place to grow up. “Yes, we are very lucky,” he said of the privilege that his children can grow up away from Hollywood pomp. Of course, it is not just any farm: the estate includes an 18th century mansion of 900 square meters, with a swimming pool and tennis court.
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