HE truly respects George Clooney for playing Edward R. Murrow in the Broadway stage version of Good Night and Good Luck.

It must have been hugely intimidating as Clooney’s last stage performance was in the 1986 play Vicious, in which he played a prostitute and drug dealer.

A portrait of Sex Pistols’ star Sid Vicious, it premiered at Hollywood’s The Complex theatre (6476 Santa Monica Blvd.).

That said, HE slightly disagrees with Clooney’s 2022 assessment of Paul Newman‘s decision to play an alcoholic attorney in Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict (’82).

Clooney: “Newman figured out that he was a character actor, and he accepted that role. He didn’t fight it or try to get his face done [in order to] look younger. He just said,’Okay, that’s who I am now’, and in doing this he changed expectations a little bit.”

Born in 1925, Newman was around 56 when he starred in The Verdict, and he looked fantastic, of course — intense blue eyes, beautifully cut gray hair, lean physique, not even a hint of a neck wattle. Lumet guided Newman into playing a certain down-at-the-heels, frayed-at-the-seams vulnerability, but Newman was clearly projecting a movie star aura in that film. Plus he got to fuck 35 year-old Charlotte Rampling.

So Newman was not playing a grubby, seen-better-days character — he was playing a gleaming silver fox with a receding drinking problem.