Did Quentin Tarantino Warrant George Clooney’s Cattiness?

Brothers. Photo: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

We’d have to imagine there are a lot of reasons to get mad at Quentin Tarantino. He’s famously so annoying that he can make Fiona Apple swear off cocaine. But what’s his longtime buddy George Clooney mad about? “Quentin said some shit about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him,” Clooney told GQ in an August 13 interview. “He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about you, and somebody else, and then this guy goes, ‘Well, what about George?’ He goes, he’s not a movie star. And then he literally said something like, ‘Name me a movie since the millennium.’ And I was like, ‘Since the millennium? That’s kind of my whole fucking career.’” The girls are fighting! Except it doesn’t appear Tarantino ever said that.

Tarantino has talked about movie stardom before — in fact he got into some hot water with Simu Liu for saying that Marvel doesn’t create movie stars when he went on Tom Segura’s podcast, 2 Bears 1 Cave, in 2022. But even in that interview, he notes specifically that “back in 2005, if an actor stars in a movie that does as good as the Marvel movies do, then that guy’s an absolute star — it means people dig him or her and they like them and want to see them in stuff.” Notably, Tarantino specifically makes an example of 2005, which is the year Clooney’s role in Syriana won him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and by which point he had starred in multiple Ocean’s movies.

Tarantino and Clooney have worked together once before, on the movie From Dusk Till Dawn, which Tarantino wrote and co-starred in as Clooney’s brother, but notably didn’t direct. Clooney even has a now-famous interview after the fact in which he whacks Tarantino for saying in an MTV interview at the time that he cast Clooney because they looked like brothers. That idea makes Clooney scrunch his face and go “What?” Since From Dusk Till Dawn, it doesn’t seem like Tarantino has bothered to bring up Clooney in any interviews, though Vulture has reached out to Tarantino for comment. Is it better if he said it behind closed doors?