'Luck' is on his Side

EW Now that you're back in shape after filming Syriana and Good Night, is there a vain part of you that wants to see yourself looking good on screen again?
CLOONEY I actually don't have that nutty vanity. Some of the reviews of Good Night, and Good Luck would go, ''the doughy George.'' And the truth is, it wasn't that I'd put on weight, it was that I hadn't lost it from the other one yet! There is a part of you where you miss the leading-man part, but I'm not giving up on that. The Good German is a real old-fashioned lead.

EW What's it been like for you to conduct your first Oscar campaign this year?
CLOONEY The most surprising thing is that it is like running a political campaign. There's David Strathairn, who doesn't want to do anything for himself. He's like, ''I don't want to do anything.'' So my job then is to convince him that any attention we can bring to the film helps the film make money, and since everyone in the film is on the back end, that it could actually help a lot of other actors get paid — though the deals we had to make weren't first-dollar deals, so we're not going to see any money on the back end. But more than that, we'll have more people see it. So you have to balance getting it out there with selling your soul.

EW You'll likely get three nominations this year. But if you could only have one, which would you choose?
CLOONEY Well, let me think. Um, directing. But that's a really tough category — there are a lot of old pros in there.

At that moment, our waitress arrives with a pair of fortune cookies on a plate. Clooney grabs one and breaks it open. '''You'll never need to worry about a steady income,''' he reads. ''See? That means I'm going to get killed on the way out of here.''

If he was hoping a freak accident would get him out of that colonoscopy, he had no such luck. The next day, asked via e-mail how the procedure went, Clooney — who snagged a DGA nomination after all, by the way — replied with one word: ''Probing.'' For the moment, at least, his life and his work could be described the same way.