George Clooney confirmed a long-swirling rumor—that he gifted 14 of his best friends $1 million in cash each— in a new interview with GQ.
Clooney was being interviewed for a profile related to GQ naming him Man of the Year for 2020. The reporter, Zach Baron, asked about the massive payday and Clooney finally confirmed it, saying that he viewed it as payback for the times they supported him when he was a starving young actor.
"I just thought basically if I get hit by a bus, they’re all in the will," he said. "So why the f–-k am I waiting to get hit by a bus?”
The logistics of moving $14 million in cash are a bit harder than you might think, if you don't work for Brinks. Clooney had to find a bank that had that amount of cash on hand in Los Angeles, then he had to move the cash around in fear of getting robbed.
"I packed in a million bucks, cash, which isn’t as much as you think it is, weight-wise, into these Tumi bags,” he said of the haul he carried around in a van made to look like a florist.
He kept the transaction as secret as possible, only telling an assistant and "a couple of security guys that were sh–ting themselves.”
When the time came, Clooney showed off a bit of dramatic flair he'd picked up over the course of his career.
"I just held up a map and I just pointed to all the places I got to go in the world and all the things I’ve gotten to see because of them. And I said, ‘How do you repay people like that?’” he said. "And I said, ‘Oh, well: How about a million bucks?’”
The decision came when Clooney was still an aging bachelor, with no idea how he would ever run through his wealth alone.
"I was a single guy. All of us were aging. I was 52 or something. And most of my friends are older than me,” he said. “And I thought, what I do have are these guys . . . I’ve slept on their couches when I was broke. They loaned me money when I was broke. They helped me when I needed help over the years . . . And I thought, you know, without them I don’t have any of this.”
His generosity didn't go unnoticed on social media.
