George Clooney has joked that he had to take his "liver out and wash it" after his last visit to Ireland.
The actor and director was interviewed by Miriam O'Callaghan on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday morning about his new movie The Boys in The Boat and he spoke fondly about his Irish roots and how he intends to come back to Ireland to further investigate his family tree.
"Irish connection? Clooney? Come on, come on!" he said. "I visited Ireland and I had a wonderful time and I saw a bunch of Clooneys, my relatives. I didn’t know but the moment I got there, I started to see all these people who look like my family. We all left during the potato famine, our family did."
Clooney’s great, great grandfather departed Kilkenny in 1840s to start a new life in America and asked if he intended to return to Ireland and do more investigations into his Irish ancestry, Clooney joked, "Of course! I had to leave because I had to take my liver out and wash it after my week in Ireland. It almost killed me but we had a great time. I love it there.
"The crazy thing is I got there in February and it was forty degrees and sunny the whole time I was there. I can’t come back this year because I’m working. We took our kids there the last time when they were two but I’d like to take them back so they can understand what all my family members are saying."
The Boys in The Boat, which tells the true story of how a rowing team from the University of Washington made it to the Berlin Olympics in 1936, is Clooney's latest directorial project.
Based on the 2013 book of the same name by Daniel James Brown, Callum Turner plays the lead role of rower Joe Rantz, who is abandoned by his family but finds a new home with the college rowing team.
The team were very much underdogs in Berlin and Clooney says that was what drew him to the story.
"Sure. I think all good sports movies, all the sports movies I grew up watching like Hoosiers and Pride of The Yankees, the underdog is the good part of telling a good sports story.
"So, when I read the book, I loved it but I thought it was going to be a hard film to make and it was a hard film to make! But when you have all these really smart, talented and athletic young actors we were ok."
Boys in The Boat involved a grueling three-and-half month shoot mostly on water and Turner told Miriam, "George set us up to succeed. They gave us an Olympic gold medalist to train us for two months, four hours a day, and we worked out on top of that and got us into a position where we were actually able to do the thing."
The 1936 Berlin Olympics was of course exploited by Hitler as a showcase for Nazi Germany
"Jesse Owens was there, the African American taking on the supposed supreme race so there was a lot going on," Clooney said. "It was less known at the time.
"We all know now how bad the Nazis were and how bad Hitler was but no one knew where that was going to go and you can’t play that in 1936 - `these guys seem like idiots but you know . . . ' as opposed to `they’re going to be your great enemy.’"
The Boys in The Boat sees Clooney return to the water for the first time since he starred in The Perfect Storm in 2000 and asked what possessed him to go back to an aquatic theme, he said, "Honestly, stupidity. You get to a certain age and you forget things.
"I did A Perfect Storm twenty years ago and I forgot what a misery it was working on it. it’s hard because these boats are bigger than you think and you can’t really get close to them because of the oars so our camera boat had to stay behind them because if we get ahead of them, our weight will capsize them.
"The way we shot it - having eight boats lined up at the same time - was really complicated but you just have to get it right once which is basically what we did."
Turner, who has previously starred in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore and the TV adaptation of War and Peace, is about to start working with Eve Hewson on Hedda, which is about Henrik Ibsen's renowned 1891 stage drama, Hedda Gabler.
"Eve is a good friend of mine," said Clooney, who is matey with her father, Bono.
Clooney has largely worked as a director over the past few years but he revealed that he has just wrapped shooting a new movie called Wolves with Brad Pitt and has another movie directed by Noah Baumbach, who produced and co-wrote Barbie with his wife, Greta Gerwig, due out in the next few months.
"I got jobs, I got work," he said in mock indignation. "I gotta pay the rent sometimes."
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
The Boys in The Boat is in cinemas on 12 January.
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