Don’t get your hopes up, because George Clooney won’t be reprising his role as Batman in the upcoming The Flash movie, although Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton will be putting on their respective bat-suits.
In fact, Clooney, 60, said his turn as the Caped Crusader was so bad that, “usually they look the other way when The Flash comes by.” In a recent interview with Variety, Clooney revealed, “They didn’t ask me,” during a screening of The Tender Bar, a coming-of-age drama he directed that stars Affleck, Lily Rabe and Tye Sheridan.
Clooney played Batman in Joel Schumacher’s infamously awful 1997 film Batman & Robin opposite Chris O’Donnell and Alicia Silverstone.
“He won’t let me watch it,” Clooney’s wife Amal told the outlet. George added, “There are certain films I just go, ‘I want my wife to have some respect for me.’”
When Amal commented that their twins Alexander and Ella will want to see it, George cracked, “It’s bad when your four-year-old kid goes, ‘This sucks.’ That could be painful.”
The Tender Bar marks Clooney and Affleck’s reunion after they teamed up to produce 2012’s Argo, the political thriller that went on to win three Oscars, including best picture. Clooney joked that it took nine years for them to make another movie together because Affleck “screwed up the Batman franchise that I made so solid.”
The Tender Bar is based on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J.R. Moehringer’s memoir of the same name about his relationship with his Uncle Charlie (Affleck), who became a father figure to him while growing up on Long Island. Rabe plays his mother while Christopher Lloyd is his grandfather.
“It was a really beautiful script and Ben came on board really early on so we just thought we’d have a blast,” Clooney said.
Sheridan said this was his first time working with a director who was also an actor saying, “The dynamic changes suddenly. It’s not a director talking to an actor — it is — but it’s also an actor talking to an actor.”
The Tender Bar will be released in theaters in New York City and Los Angeles on December 17, followed by a nationwide rollout on December 22.