LOS ANGELES - Twenty years after he left
medical drama "ER", George Clooney returns to television this
month with an adaptation of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22", a novel
whose complexity the actor said made it ideal for a six-part
series.
The Oscar winner, known for films like "Syriana", "Gravity"
and "The Monuments Men", also served as executive producer and
directed two episodes of the Hulu series set during World War
Two about a member of a U.S. bomber squadron fighting the
higher-ups in the military bureaucracy.
"I thought it was a fun way to tell this story. It's hard to
tell this story as complex as it is in a two-hour movie,"
Clooney said at the series premiere in Los Angeles on Tuesday
evening.
"It's never been about the medium although television and
streaming has gotten much more interesting and more fun, it was
more about telling the story. It's about telling good stories."
Heller's 1961 novel, previously adapted into a 1970 movie,
follows U.S. bombardier Yossarian who is infuriated that the
army keeps raising the number of missions he must fly to be
released from duty.
Yossarian's only way to avoid the missions is to declare
insanity, but the only way to prove insanity is a willingness to
embark on more of the highly dangerous bombing runs, thus
creating the novel's absurd 'Catch-22.'
"The Sinner" actor Christopher Abbott stars as Yossarian
while "The Wolf of Wall Street" actor Kyle Chandler plays his
commander, Colonel Cathcart. Clooney portrays training commander
Scheisskopf.
"It's a heightened piece, it's satirical, it's dramatic,
it's harrowing, it's very funny," Abbott said.
"It kind of lives in a world on its own but I think the
themes are kind of universal because they're really just about
the human condition."
At the premiere, Clooney also talked about his friend and
former actress Meghan Markle, who married Britain's Prince Harry
last year and gave birth to their first child on Monday.
Clooney, who attended the couple's wedding last year, has
previously criticised the media for harassing Meghan and said
the arrival of their son would lead to increased media scrutiny.
"I think it'll intensify it, of course. But it's never about
the media following you around because...if you're a royal,
that's part of what you have to do," he said
"It's the other versions of it: going to interview people's
parents, that kind of stuff that it starts to step into a really
dark place...It just, sort of, the press turned on them and...I
think people should be a little kinder. She's a young woman who
just had a baby."