When Billy Crudup met George Clooney 15 years ago, the aura was real.
“It was pretty clear: He's George Clooney through and through,” Crudup says of his costar in the Netflix dramedy “Jay Kelly” (in select theaters now, streaming Dec. 5). “He truly understands the space that he occupies and has found a remarkable comfort in it.”
Flash back 40 years or so, though, and it's a much different Clooney. That guy is bombing auditions, including a reading for Francis Ford Coppola where Clooney’s agent told him the next day that “The Godfather” director thought he was drunk. Unlike his title character in “Jay Kelly,” who rides an accidental first audition into A-list status early in his career, Clooney didn’t find fame until he was 33 as the star of 1990s medical drama "ER."
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“That's late in Hollywood life to get successful,” Clooney says. “I'd failed so many times. I'd done 13 pilots and seven television series before ‘ER,’ so my trajectory was very different.
