After George Clooney agreed to top-line Jay Kelly , he learned that director Noah Baumbach prefers his actors to shoot a lot of takes. Clooney was already all in on the project; he’d said yes less than 24 hours after receiving the screenplay. But the star felt less than thrilled about that element. “I literally said to him, ‘Noah, look, I love the script. I love you as a director, but I’m 63 years old, dude—I can’t do 50 takes,’” Clooney tells me. “‘I don’t have it in me. I’ve got the acting range from A to B.’”

Clooney’s points are core to Jay Kelly’s delicious metatext. The film, cowritten by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer in her feature-film scripting debut, stars Clooney as a gigantic movie star in his 60s facing down a personal reckoning. His career has been characterized

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