George Clooney's Baffling History Of Elaborate Pranks
George Clooney is a successful professional prankster who also happens to have a side-gig as an actor. Clooney's pranks range from simple stuff like putting a "Small Penis on Board" bumper sticker on Brad Pitt's car or spraying water on Ryan Gosling's pants while giving him directions, to strangely long-winded plans you could only pull off with the assistance of some sort of undiscovered personality disorder. So, in order to help whoever is tasked with diagnosing Anti-Social Clooney Syndrome in the future, we present a brief history of his most bizarrely elaborate pranks:
Convincing His Roommate That His Cat Took A Giant Human Poop
Clooney's most famous prank involves fellow actor Richard Kind of The Goldbergs and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. Clooney crashed in Kind's apartment as an unemployed, recently divorced unknown actor in the early '90s and decided to repay his friend's hospitality via mental manipulation.
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It started with Kind commenting that his cat hadn't pooped in three days, unaware that Clooney had been emptying the litter box during that time. Instead of saying anything, Clooney continued secretly disposing of the poop and letting his friend worry about the cat's health. When Kind took the cat to the vet and started giving him laxative, Clooney says he simply upped his cleaning efforts. That is until he realized there was only one way he could end this prank: by squatting over the box, taking a crap, and then letting Kind find what he once described as "a chicken pot pie-sized human dump," which he briefly blamed on the tiny little kitten before the gross truth dawned on him.
Nearly 30 years later, Clooney still takes delight in telling the story, while Kind refuses to discuss it, except to say that 1) the laxative part is an embellishment, and 2) even if you manage to prank Clooney, the retaliation is just "not worth it," because he's" Machiavellian" and "Rasputin-esque" (presumably meaning that not even death could stop him from getting your ass back).
Shrinking Matt Damon's Wardrobe To Make Him Think He's Gaining Weight
Matt Damon is a common target for Clooney's pranks because there's just something about the guy that makes you want to watch him suffer. While shooting The Monuments Men, Clooney learned that Damon was trying to lose weight and had the wardrobe department tighten his clothes by an eight of an inch over a period of about a month and a half, to Damon's silent frustration. At least Clooney stopped short of having the props department slowly shrink all the furniture and such to convince Damon his diet really wasn't working.
While telling that story, Damon revealed that Clooney even pranked his own father, who appears in The Monuments Men, by screening the film for him and adding "In loving memory of Nick Clooney" at the end, because it wouldn't come out for six months and "it's much cheaper to take it off than it is to put in on." Of course, the ultimate prank was just casting them in that 30% Tomatometer score turd of a movie in the first place.
Clooney has repeatedly talked about spending "years" taking out full-page ads of Damon in a green speedo (from Talented Mr. Ripley) with the message "For Your Consideration: Matt Damon for Sexiest Man Alive," making it look like Damon paid for them. Sadly, our long quest to find the legendary ad revealed that Clooney simply tried to take it, but Variety reportedly refused to run it. Still, Clooney told the story in the media so much that it amounted to the same thing, and Damon won in 2007. Perhaps the whole wardrobe stunt was simply Clooney's way to getting his friend's ego back in check after that.
Faking Other Actors' Stationery To Send Embarrassing Letters
One of Clooney's favorite weapons of prank warfare is mail fraud. As in, he will fake a letterhead from the name of a "friend" and send embarrassing letters to other famous actors, like when he posed as Brad Pitt and tried to make him look like an ass in the eyes of Tom Cruise and Don Cheadle. In one instance, he had "Pitt" send Meryl Streep a huge folder containing 60 CDs from a voice coach to "help her" prepare for her role in The Iron Lady, to Streep's years-long bafflement.
And then there's the time he made Damon sound butthurt in a letter to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler over a Golden Globes joke, which resulted in Damon receiving two giant fruit baskets to his house: one as an apology in case the letter was real, and one trash talking Clooney in case it was him all along.
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Top image: Wikimedia Commons
