‘We live in an age of cruelty’: George Clooney rebukes Tarantino for insulting Paul Dano | film

George Clooney said he would be “honoured” to work with three actors who were harshly criticized by Quentin Tarantino last month. Speaking at the association’s Adult Film Awards on January 10, Clooney said: “Paul Dano, Owen Wilson and Matthew Lillard, by the way, I would be honored to work with these actors. I’m honored.”

Clooney went on to describe his new film, Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, as a film “made by people who love actors — that’s an important part. The people I’ve known most of my life…actually, most of them are actors. I have a great affinity.” [for them]And I don’t enjoy watching people act cruelly.

“We live in a time of cruelty,” Clooney concluded. “We don’t need to add to it.”

In December 2025, Tarantino faced significant backlash for his criticism of actors Paul Dano, Matthew Lillard, and Owen Wilson during an appearance on Bret Easton Ellis’ radio show. The director said that “There Will Be Blood” would have ranked fifth on his personal list of the best films of the century so far, had it not been for co-star Daniel Day-Lewis.

“[It] “It would have a good chance of being No. 1 or 2 if it didn’t have a big, giant flaw…and the flaw is Paul Dano,” Tarantino said. “It’s obviously supposed to be two-handed, but it’s also pretty obvious that it’s not two-handed. [Dano] Weak sauce, man. She’s a weak sister.”

Tarantino went on to describe Dano as a “weak, weak, uninteresting man” and “the weakest actor in the Screen Actors Guild” and stressed that he never enjoyed his performance in anything. “I don’t care about him, I don’t care about Owen Wilson, I don’t care about Matthew Lillard,” he said.

Clooney previously shared the screen with Lillard in Oscar-winner Alexander Payne’s 2011 film The Descendants, and co-starred with Wilson in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox (2009). He has not yet collaborated with Dano.

Several of Dano’s former colleagues have defended the actor after Tarantino’s attack, including Ben Stiller, Batman director Matt Reeves, and Day-Lewis, whose representatives told The Guardian that he agreed with the sentiment expressed in a fan post on Instagram declaring Dano “one of the best and most talented actors of his generation.”

Speaking at a fan convention a few days after Tarantino was criticized, Lillard said his words were harmful. “It’s disgusting,” he said. “And you wouldn’t say that to Tom Cruise. You wouldn’t say that to someone who’s one of the top actors in Hollywood. I’m very popular in this room. I’m not very popular in Hollywood. It’s two very different worlds, right? And so, you know, it’s humbling, and it’s painful.”

Wilson has not yet commented.

Clooney and Tarantino worked on Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 film From Dusk Till Dawn, but have not collaborated since then and their relationship has changed.

“Quentin has said some things about me recently, so I’m a little upset with him,” Clooney told GQ magazine last year. “He did some interviews where he would name movie stars, and he would talk about them [Brad Pitt]And someone else, and then this guy said, “Well, what about George?” “He’s not a movie star,” he says.