George Clooney on BATMAN & ROBIN and How He Tried To Talk Ben Affleck Out of Playing Batman

As much as I enjoy George Clooney’s work, Batman & Robin was not his greatest achievement. It’s a laughably bad movie and the experience and outcome was so bad that he tried to talk Ben Affleck out of taking on the role of Batman for the DCEU.

Clooney worked as a producer with Affleck on the movie Argo and while he was working with him, he cautioned him, telling THR:

"I actually did talk to him about it. I said, ‘Don’t do it.’ It was only from my experience, which is, you know..." 

Clooney was quick to add that, "He did great, though." I can easily see why he would give Affleck that advice, because taking on the role didn’t really do him any favors. He did learn a few lessons from it, though. He went on to talk about he experience working on the film saying:

"[Arnold] Schwarzenegger was paid, I think, $25 million for that, which was like 20 times more than I was paid for it, and, you know, we never even worked together! We worked together one day. But I took all the heat. Now, fair deal; I was playing Batman and I wasn’t good in it, and it wasn’t a good film, but what I learned from that failure was, I had to rethink how I was working. Because now I wasn’t just an actor getting a role, I was being held responsible for the film itself."

Clooney has since gone on to have an incredible career making some pretty great movies. While playing Batman may not have been his best role, it did guide him in the direction of the kind of films that he would make in the future.